Green building design solution for a kindergarten in Amman

Buildings in Jordan consume a significant amount of energy for heating, cooling and lighting purposes. Therefore, improving energy performance of the existing building in Jordan will significantly reduce national electrical consumption. In this work, an existed kindergarten in Amman was redesigned moving toward low energy performance, in doing so, the proposed design studied the use of applying lighting saving lamps, adding thermal insulation for walls, solar water heater for domestic hot water, on grid photovoltaic system as a source of electrical power to generate free solar electricity to cover the electrical load demand of the kindergarten, and finally a heat recovery system for the exhaust air in air conditioning and ventilation. Also, a suitable economic evaluation criterion was used to estimate the payback period of all systems applied. The results showed energy saving fluorescent lamps can reduce the energy use by about 15%, and reduce the heating load up to 10%, achieved by using thermal insulation and 61.3% by using exhaust air heat recovery system. Furthermore, suitable energy conversion using solar systems were sufficient to cover the domestic hot water heating demand to reach zero of domestic hot water heating energy during sunshine days. The annual reduction achieved in carbon dioxide (CO2) emission was 11.7 ton. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.