Energy audit of a tropical building / Fadzlah Md. Aris and Irman Iskandar Mohamad Zain

An Energy audit was done on a tall, commercial building in Subang Jaya, Malaysia. The building was designed to suit the tropical climate. The Mesiniaga building has been selected because the building has won numerous awards for the Bio-Climatic building. The Mesiniaga building was chosen of which the cooling load for the building was calculated and by studying the cooling strategies used recommendation are made based on the findings. A simple audit was carried out involved a walkthrough survey, interviews, some measurements, observation, data collection and calculation of cooling loads manually and verified by using a computer software known as ACCAL. It was found that the building architect had used skycourts, vertical landscaping, core orientation, round shape to minimise heat gain, solar shading, roof top swimming pool, and fluorescent lighting for thermal strategies. Meanwhile the cooling load of the building is 73.97 W/sqm or 141.78 tons by using the Carrier method done manually. The result by using ACCAL software is 73.43 W/sqm or 140.74 tons.