English

Smart ventilation in residential buildings has gained rising attention recently for the benefits of reducing energy consumption and improving indoor environmental quality. This paper presents a review of the smart ventilation in residential buildings papers published from January 2017 to August 2023, as a continuation of (Guyot, Sherman, and Walker 2018) who reviewed the publications in this area up to 2016. A systematic approach was used following the PRISMA protocol.

The BENEFIT project seeks to assess indoor environmental quality and occupant comfort in energy efficient non-domestic Irish buildings with the aim of developing ventilation guidelines for future retrofits and new builds. The project, in collaboration with SEAI’s Pathfinder programme, aims to conduct a comprehensive and scientifically robust assessment of the impacts of energy-efficient policies in non-domestic settings across Ireland, with a particular focus on newly constructed energy-efficient buildings.

The rapid growth in the use of low-cost sensors for indoor air quality (IAQ) measurement campaigns, following the COVID-19 pandemic, has significantly improved public awareness of ventilation and IAQ in buildings. Yet, we still know very little about the level of pollutants in our indoor environments. Unlike outdoor air, IAQ is not routinely actively monitored and there are currently no widely accepted, standardised methodologies, procedures or regulations for doing so.  

Project RESILIENCE set out to examine overheating in a variety of building archetypes, but also examined several aspects of overheating related to the tools that are used, the weather data that has been employed in dynamic simulations and potential low-cost solutions to improving the resilience of the existing non-residential building stock that relies upon ventilative cooling.

There is an increasing need to consider and evaluate the effect of existing ambient warmness on current low energy buildings to determine if current guidelines and standards are robust or resilient in the face of projected future warming. Thus far there is a lack of empirical evidence from low energy non-residential spaces where resilience metrics are seldom explored. The purpose of this presentation is to present the status on overheating from over 30 different low energy non-residential buildings located in Ireland.

Project RESILIENCE set out to examine overheating risk in a variety of non-residential building archetypes, but also examined several aspects of both overheating risk metrics and indoor thermal resilience evaluation criteria. Assessing the future risk of overheating in new and retrofitted buildings is usually undertaken by applying national regulations and buildings codes where minimum criteria is typically published.

Thermal comfort of adolescents (10-17 year olds) in school classrooms is an important but less explored topic. The classroom thermal environment impacts students comfort, learning, and health. Due to differences related to physiology and ability to influence their environments, children’s thermal comfort needs and even their interpretation of thermal comfort differs from adults.

Children spend about 80-90% of their time indoors, making the quality of indoor environments (IEQ) crucial, particularly since children are more susceptible to pollutants due to their developing bodies and higher relative air intake per body weight. This study examines the influence of various indoor environmental conditions on cognitive performance in primary school students. Data collected over the first three weeks from a total eight-week cognitive study are analysed, focusing on the impact of thermal comfort and CO2 levels as proxies for ventilation. 

During the COVID-19 pandemic, besides sanitising, masking, and increasing social distancing, opening classroom windows was the NZ Ministry of Education's main requirement for reopening schools. However, a pre-COVID-19 survey showed that only a third of the NZ teachers opened windows during teaching time. Achieving a suitable ventilation level could not rely on humans to open windows. Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning (HVAC) systems are not affordable for most NZ schools.

Improving air quality in existing classrooms can be difficult if retrofitting a mechanical ventilation system is considered too expensive or cannot be implemented due to other reasons, e.g., heritage protection. Especially in the cold winter months, window airing initiated by pupils or teachers is often not sufficient.