Building Use Diary#
You need to understand when users are in your building and what your occupancy rate is like for four reasons:
to inform whether it’s worth making changes to make your building more attractive to local groups that need space, so you can get more income.
to give a sense of how much waste is involved in heating suites of rooms together and whether it might be worth heating some independently.
to help you understand which of the heating energy efficiency controls are the right ones to use in your circumstances.
when used with temperature data, to help you think about whether users are comfortable and what they might be doing if they are not.
Whoever takes care of bookings should have this information.
One way to capture it is by taking screenshots of the calendaring system over some typical periods. If you do this, be mindful of personal and sensitive details. Addiction and domestic violence support groups often do not want their meeting location widely known, and data protection regulations require you to be careful with personal details like phone numbers. You could use Microsoft Paint to blank out any of your users’ personal or sensitive details before passing them to others. It is useful if it’s possible to tell something about what sort of group it is - children running around versus older adults sitting still, for instance.
Many calendaring systems will allow you to export the entries between two dates in a standard format, an “.ics” file. More tech-savvy professionals will know how to view this file in their own calendaring system. Google Calendar and some other systems have the option to share or export a completely anonymised “Busy/Free” version that only shows whether there is something in the calendar or not. This can be a useful feature. Web-based booking systems also usually show an anonymised calendar to people who might want to hire a room.
Better than nothing
Even just knowing which mornings, afternoons, and evenings a week the building is usually occupied is helpful, for instance, in a table like this:
Mon |
Tues |
Wed |
Thu |
Fri |
Sat |
Sun |
|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
hall |
A |
P |
E |
APE |
|||
office |
A |
A |
A |
A |
A |
This building’s hall usually has at least some use on Monday mornings, Tuesday afternoons, Wednesday evenings, and all three on Fridays, and usually empty otherwise. The office is occupied on weekday mornings.