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Abstract
In this study, the service lives of the building elements, an important parameter in renovations
and LCA/LCC calculations, are analyzed, based on a comprehensive literature review and a
survey of Swiss households. The literature review showed that there is no consensus about
the service lives, among the different countries, while the results of the survey on the
renovation timing of the building elements, showed on average an agreement between the
element’s effective lifetime and the average from the literature data. In addition, based on
the literature data, lognormal distributions were defined for the service life of the building
elements and then the probabilistic LCA & LCC were calculated. The results showed that the
uncertainty of 6 building elements’ service lives can significantly influence the reliability of the
results. For the practitioners, the study confirms that the current practice of using service life
data of the SIA 2032 technical books, for building LCA and LCC, constitutes a relative good
estimation of the most probable value of the probabilistic LCA.