Professor Wim Boydens is co-owner,

technical director and CSTO of Studiebureau Boydens (www.boydens.be), one of leading M&E design and energy-consulting offices in Belgium, well known of their innovative, sustainable and client oriented solutions. He is a visiting professor at Ghent University since 1999.

What kind of criteria you use when the equipment is selected to your buildings. Is the low investments cost the only criteria?

Investment cost is almost in no case the only criteria. LCA, TCO, are more the focus of selection. Impact of equipment on energy efficiency is a major concern, as well as long term behaviour of equipment, quality, maintainability and after sales availability of supplier-support.

Have you ever had problems with products which do not perform as assumed or declared? What kind of problems?

Mainly problems when suppliers declare to be compliant with the specifications imposed by the designer without any test results stating this. Problems occurred already regarding noise levels and heat recovery efficiency.

How important it is to know the performance of the products installed your buildings?

It is extremely important since characteristics influence the building real energy consumption and the energy performance declaration (EPBD). Also in case of retrofitting it is useful to be able to identify performance of installed products. Same issue occurs in trouble-analysis in existing buildings.

What are the benefits of the certification system of product performance?

Major advantage is to verify compliance with the tender specifications, to compare performances of different suppliers of different regions on a correct level, without test procedure uncertainties.

Easy and clear prescription process in tender documents and guaranteed predicted design performance.

How would you develop the product certification further?

It’s not easy for me to define feasible strategies, but we welcome every improvement towards a transparent and uniform certified performance identification of products.