Benchmarking and code compliance of selected buildings in Kuwait

The objective of this paper is to develop innovative solutions and methodologies to evaluate and improve the sustainability of Kuwait’s built environment in order to establish a new paradigm in engineering design. In the present paper, the investigation and evaluation of code compliance of selected typical buildings with the building regulations and codes is carried out. The objectives of the paper are to make a program to verify the code compliance of the selected buildings and to collect the regulations pertaining to present energy codes and practice in Kuwait. A program to verify the code compliance of the STBs including the selected 30 homes in Block 8 of Al Qadesiya was developed. The data collected by the Kuwait University team regarding the 30 homes were used for the code compliance analysis. The year of construction, floor area, window area per direction, lighting load per square meter, AC load in kW or refrigeration ton, the status about insulation of the building were identified as the important parameters that can be used for the code compliance analysis. Among the above-mentioned parameters, the lighting load and the AC load in kW or RT, along with window area per direction and year of construction, are the parameters that can be evaluated for their code compliance. A program was written using Visual Basic and MSExcel as the front end to verify the code compliance. The standard value for lighting load analysis is 7 Watts per square meter and the AC load standard value is 60 Watts per square meter or 1.6 kW or RT.