A Survey of Environmental Performance Enhancement Strategies and Building Data Capturing Techniques in the Nigerian Context

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This paper investigates current practices and future possibilities of improvement measures and data capturing of existing buildings using a questionnaire survey of 133 building professionals in Benin City. The inter-relationship between energy efficiency, the environment, and building design with a high potential for meaningful retrofit to mitigate energy inefficiencies is known but not fully utilised. The collected thought on current practices signifies the need for developing a more economical and reliable methodology for data capturing and evaluation. In general, the topic is interesting, and a few questions are required to be well handled.

1. The authors performed the survey of environmental performance enhancement strategies and building data capturing techniques, which is a great work. The reviewer suggests to focus more on the short comings of the existing references. The following papers related to the building retrofitting and environmental strategies can be included into the Intro and contents. 10.1016/j.jobe.2022.104904;

2. The lengths of Fig 2 and 3 are suggested to be the same (i.e., bandwidths from 0-100%).

3. The Discussion and conclusion can be further enhanced and improved.

Author Response

Thank you for your review which was very helpful.

The article recommended is a recent one and although its main focus is on seismic retrofitting, I found it helpful to reinforce some points in the introduction part of my manuscript.

The second and third points have also been attended to. The majority of the revisions have been highlighted red. Thanks

Reviewer 2 Report

Dear authors,

I enjoyed reading the article as it gives the opportunity to understand the building professional practices in Nigeria. This study definitely worth improvement as this initial study would provide foundations and backgrounds to other studies in the future. Therefore, I only have a few comments.

The first is the study case selection, which can be improved by trying to answer questions, such as why you chose the city and not others, what methods you used to select the professionals, what the types of the buildings are, and what professionals mean (i.e. building managers, inspectors, designers, etc.).

Next is to provide descriptive statistics of the respondents. It would be great if you could provide a bit more information about the survey respondents. You mentioned about having their demographic information collected, please provide a table on the manuscript. 

On the POE questions. Do you also conduct survey activities for building occupants in addition to the designers? I don't see how you connect building designers' surveys to having an accurate post-occupancy evaluation. It will, perhaps, be a good idea to provide the questionnaires in the Appendix.

Another worth analysis is to do some correlations on your findings. Are there any interesting findings besides the counts and proportions? Are there correlations in the data?

Thank you,

 

Author Response

Hi,

Thank you for your review. I want to believe I understood your comments.

I have reinforced why Benin city was selected in my revision. The methods used to select the professionals were previously mentioned (the official Whatsapp group of the Benin City chapter of the Nigeria institute of Architects) as well as some hard copies and building designers are the professionals. I have tried to enhance the clarity of the writing.

I have now introduced more demographic statistics of the survey respondents.

Also, considering the scope of this study, the main aim is to identify the design features that can be used for building performance improvement that would need to be captured in the case of existing buildings. So, it is the built environment professionals as stipulated by the national building code of Nigeria that carries out such design and retrofits. Thus the POE referred to in this study is only concerned about if the building designers get feedback about their buildings post occupancy to understand how and if it is performing as intended.

for your last point, there are some correlations, however it is beyond the scope of this manuscript. It has been documented as part of my submitted PhD thesis. I hope to do a follow up publication after my VIVA next month.

 

PS. the Manuscript has been updated.

Thank you for the insightful review.

Reviewer 3 Report

1. Abstract - Introduce a line highlighting the key result to gather other readers' interest.

2. Introduction — does not provide other research outcomes to enable a meaningful discussion.

2. Materials and methods — hide critical factors, starting with the method used to run and calculate the outcomes, such as group selection, questions, and possible answers, to name a few. Also, the different gathering information methods can impact the outcomes; they should remain the same to decrease personal relation interference. 

3. Results — No comments.

4. Discussion — Not provided. The discussion section compares the research results with other authors' publications (on the subject).

5. Conclusion — Not provided. It is a summary of each section in a comprehensive and step-by-step organization, highlighting the impact points to science, also with a glance toward the future.

 

Author Response

Hi,

Thank you for your review. I want to believe I understood your comments.

In the abstract, there is already a statement that captures one of the key results of the survey. See below

"The inter-relationship between energy efficiency, the environment, and building design with a high potential for meaningful retrofit to mitigate energy inefficiencies is known but not fully utilised"

Due to limited word count (200 words), I could not add more. so I resulted to using instead, "The collected thought on current practices signifies the need for developing a more economical and reliable methodology for data capturing and evaluation"

Also, one major limitation of this study is the  limited studies on environmental building performance improvement and data capture in the study area. I have tried to bring together narratives that are close to make up a meaningful outcome.

for the materials and methods, I got a bit confused. However, I have initially stated that the analysis was carried out using SPSS and descriptive statistics of simple frequency and significant level analysis. The gathering information method was the use of the questionnaire which was sent to the official Whatsapp group of the Benin City chapter members of the Nigeria institute of architects. The hard copy ones were only distributed to the older architects that are usually not tech savvy.

The discussions and conclusions are merged and presented as the discussion in this manuscript. the discussion is based on the nature of the study and on the working hypothesis.

Overall, the manuscript has been improved and highlighted in red

Thank you.

 

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

Dear authors,

The revision reads better. Thank you for the quick turnaround.

Reviewer 3 Report

The current version is considered ready for publication.