Nordic Renovation Center – A toolbox for better building quality and indoor environments
The neglected building maintenance is currently estimated to cost 30–50 billion euros in Finland only. Neglected building maintenance and postponed repairs lead to aggravated user health problems and more extensive need and increased costs for repairs. Insufficient expertise on how to design and renovate buildings is a major barrier to energy efficient and sustainable development of buildings.
To be able to meet the new demands there is an urgent need for competence development and better training in the building sector. The main goal for Nordic Renovation Center project was to increase the number of skilled professionals needed to perform resource and energy efficient renovations in Finland, Sweden and Norway. The goal is now reached by this newly established Nordic Renovation Center service.
– International and Nordic co-operation in renovation has been missing, each country has worked on only a national level. Nordic Renovation Center (NRC) shares best practices and support regional stakeholders with information, education and new pedagogical tools on how to perform sustainable renovations, says Project Manager, researcher Annika Glader from Novia University of Applied Sciences.
The primary target groups are companies within the building sector, municipalities and property owners. The project has gathered information on sustainable renovation methods and have now new tools for proactive property maintenance and energy efficient renovations.
NRC aims to become a permanent service. For this to materialize, Solved Oy partnered together with the NRC project to develop the web-presence, new website and a branded match making service to facilitate the sharing of best renovation practices in Sweden, Finland and Norway.
Karin Sandberg from RISE Research Institutes of Sweden has already seen the benefits of NRC:
– NRC is a service that spans over all Nordic countries. There are national renovation centers and other institutions in each country that help property owners do renovations in a more sustainable way in the future. But NRC provides a something in addition, it is a communication and collaboration platform and a media for changing best practices between countries. In our renovation case in Skellefteå we have managed to utilize a renovation process developed in Oulu, Finland. NRC gave us the opportunity to become aware of such a process in the first place.
Raymond Riise from UiT, The Arctic University of Norway wants to point out another important benefit of NRC:
– We have gained and learnt a lot while going through our renovation case in Harstad. A renovation case like ours can be published in NRC for others to see. Of course, we have our contacts and channels to communicate, but NRC provides an additional avenue. By opening our case in NRC we were able to source expertise and share the learnings for anyone to benefit from.
Project Manager Mauritz Knuts from Vaasa Region Development Company VASEK sums up the benefits of the NRC platform:
– Most of the renovation projects go wrong in some way. We do not learn from each other, not from the errors others have made, not from the success stories. Each project starts from scratch. Information and experiences, they do exist but they are scattered around, and are found out only by accident. It can be hard to find experts to help with renovations and that is what the platform is all about. You can easily find the information and expertise you need!
For more information, please contact:
Annika Glader
+358 50 5759404
annika.glader@novia.fi
[contact_member,name=Mauritz Knuts,id=22,details=Name]
The Nordic Renovation Center -project is coordinated by Novia University of Applied Sciences. The partners are Vaasa Region Development Company, Seinäjoki University of Applied Sciences, Tampere University of Technology (TUT), Umeå University/TFE, Umeå University/Education, SP Technical Research Institute of Sweden, County council of Västerbotten and UiT - The Arctic University of Norway.
‹ Go back to "News"