Remodeling is the perfect time to improve daylighting, direct gain heating, and shading with passive solar techniques. It can also provide the best opportunity to add solar water heating or even photovoltaics to a home.
The large scale implementation of high-albedo building materials and urban surfaces and the reforestation of low vegetation urban areas are being encouraged as energy-saving measures. These strategies will result in modification of the physical properties of millions of buildings (e.g roof reflectance) and th ei r microclimates (e.g., shading, wind, and evapotranspiration effects of trees). This paper is about the atmospheric impacts of regional scale changes in building properties, paved-surface characteristics, and their microclimates.
Air conditioning is often singled out as the main culprit in cases of sick building syndrome, but as Timothy Southfield explains, users need to get their houses in order.
The paper is a srudy of the effect of air infiltration on temperarure and water vapour pressure distributions within a porous layer. A theoretical formula describing these is proposed. The paper concludes with some new recommendations to the designer.
The paper describes the design strategy and performance of an air-driven solar water and ventilation preheat system, an integral part of a CEC Demonstration Project in Glasgow; noting how performance has been compromised partly by inherent, and partly unforseen design aspects - e.g. unexpected intervention by the user. There are 12 collectors and measurements described in this paper are restricted to one which faces South-East with a tilt of 30°.
The effects of cracks and holes on the exhalation of radon from concrete have been investigated. It was found that the total radon exhaled from concrete blocks was the same irrespective of the diameters of holes drilled into them, and irrespective of the number of holes drilled. Furthermore, the surface area of the concrete blocks did not have any effect on the total radon exhaled
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