The TAIL Rating Scheme

Checking Indoor Spaces with TAIL

We spend most of our lives inside buildings. So, the quality of these indoor spaces really affects our health and happiness. As we focus more on public health, it's important to check how good or bad these indoor spaces are. A good indoor space is not just good for our health, but also helps us work better and improves our life.

Because of COVID-19, people are thinking differently about the spaces inside our buildings. We need to remember that the quality of these spaces isn't just a small detail. It is really important for the people living or working there and we need to treat it that way.

The EPBD and healthy Buildings

The Energy Performance of Buildings Directive (EPBD) is a rule made by the European Union to make buildings use less energy. The goal of the EPBD is to make all buildings carbon-free by 2050. This will help the EU reach its energy and climate goals.

In 2023, the EPBD was updated. Besides making buildings more energy efficient, the update also focused on making buildings healthier for the people using them. This means that we need good ways to check the quality of indoor spaces. Saving energy in buildings is important, but not if it makes the indoor spaces worse. Good indoor spaces are a key part of energy efficient buildings.

The ALDERN Project

The ALDREN project, led by the CSTB (Centre Scientifique et Technique du Bâtiment), was a European Union project that aimed to improve energy use in buildings across Europe. ALDERN stands for Alliance for Deep Renovation in buildings. The project wanted to provide tools and measures that make sure buildings perform as expected, including being healthy for people to use.

A big part of the ALDREN project was checking the quality of indoor spaces in buildings that have had major energy improvements. They had three main goals:

Make sure that improving a building's energy use didn't make the indoor spaces worse;
Keep track of how improvements affected the indoor spaces, especially if they made them better;
Look at any extra benefits of improvements, like better health and well-being, which could make the building more valuable.

The TAIL Rating Scheme

As part of the ALDREN project, a new way to check indoor spaces was suggested. It's called the TAIL rating scheme, which stands for Thermal, Acoustic, Indoor Air Quality, and Luminous. These are the four parts of an indoor space that it checks. The TAIL index is meant to work with other ways of checking buildings.

TAIL checks each part and uses four colors to show how good or bad each part is. The overall quality of the indoor space is then decided based on the worst part. A Roman numeral shows the overall quality level. The lower the score, the better the indoor space.

TAIL uses a color scheme like a traffic light and a numbering scheme that people are familiar with. This makes it easier to understand and avoids using complicated words. The goal is not just to check the quality of indoor spaces, but also to help people understand it better. Having one indicator makes it easier for everyone involved, like building owners, designers, managers, policymakers, and the people using the buildings, to talk about it.

What TAIL measures

The TAIL system uses twelve things to check the quality of indoor spaces:

Thermal: The temperature of the air inside
Acoustic: How loud it is
Indoor Air Quality: How fast fresh air comes in, the amount of carbon dioxide, formaldehyde, and PM2.5 (tiny dust particles), the humidity, and if there’s any visible mold (checked by looking)
Light: How bright it is and how much daylight there is (checked by simulating the building’s performance)

The TAIL system is meant to be flexible. As we use it more and adapt it to different types of buildings and places, we can add other things that are relevant to each part of the indoor space. For example, in classrooms where it’s important for teachers and students to communicate, we could add a measure for echo time to the sound check. And in places where Radon is a problem, we could add a check for Radon to the air quality check.

What's Next for TAIL

TAIL was created with big energy improvement projects in mind, but it can be used for more than that. It can be used for both old and new buildings. Researchers are looking at how it can be used for different types of buildings, like classrooms, offices, and homes.

TAIL can be a useful tool for building owners to protect their investments. If the quality of an indoor space is poor and makes people uncomfortable, it can lower the building's value. TAIL can help make communication about the quality of indoor spaces easier and more reliable between investors, managers, owners, people using the buildings, and professionals.

TAIL is also useful for anyone who wants to learn more about the quality of their indoor spaces or who is just interested in what makes up an indoor space. An added bonus of TAIL is that it encourages people to monitor the quality of indoor spaces.

A TAIL Calculator

To help users calculate the TAIL rating of a building, we have created R and Python scripts that do the calculations when provided with the indoor environmental quality data in the form of a csv file. For more information and the codes, you can check out the following GitHub repository: TAIL Rating Scheme.

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