English

In France, starting January 1st, 2013, the energy performance regulation will impose an airtightness treatment for every new residential building. This translates into several tens if not hundreds of thousands of envelope airtightness measurements a year that will have to be performed. They will have to be performed by a certified operator and according to the NF EN 13829 standard. This ISO standard is being revised under the Vienna agreement to become an EN ISO standard.

The energy consumption needed for establishing a good indoor climate in shopping centres is often very high due to high internal heat loads from lighting and equipment and from a high people density at certain time intervals. This heat surplus result in a need for cooling during most of the year, typically also during the winter, and often the needed cooling is provided by a mechanical ventilation system with integrated mechanical cooling.

Hybrid ventilation (HV), as a combination of automated natural ventilation (NV) and balanced mechanical ventilation (MV), provides opportunities to use the advantages of both ventilation systems during the seasons in order to reduce energy demand and at the same time obtain comfortable indoor climate.

The UK Government strategy for all new homes to be built to zero carbon standards by 2016 is based upon a “fabric first” approach to design. This means prioritising energy efficiency improvements to the building envelope through: increasing overall levels of insulation; reducing thermal bridging; and making buildings more airtight. However, recent research has raised concerns about the standards that are actually achieved in the construction of new housing.

BR10 requires that all new residential constructions should be built as low energy housing. In order to meet these requirements residential buildings must be equipped with far more complex technology, than conventional housing. This, for example, could be a combination of mechanical balanced ventilation, natural ventilation, heat pumps, solar heating, solar cells or automatic sunscreens.

The objective of this study was to develop a method for hourly calculation of the operating temperature in order to evaluate summer comfort in dwellings to help improve building design.

Sizing rules in residential ventilation standards lack uniformity in both methodology and resulting design flow rates. Additionally, mere comparison of design flow rates is case sensitive and, due to effects of infiltration, adventitious ventilation and occupancy, ill-suited to assess performance of an exhaust ventilation system with regard to the achieved indoor air quality and energy cost in terms of heat loss.

Sizing rules in residential ventilation standards lack uniformity in both methodology and resulting design flow rates. In order to investigate the best achievable performance of natural ventilation, exhaust and fully mechanical ventilation systems, this paper presents a multi-zone simulation based optimization study for both a detached dwelling.

This paper reports on the construction, experimental set up and infiltration characteristics of a purpose built full-scale experimental house. The building has been designed as an experimental platform for measuring the moisture removal effectiveness of active and passive ventilation systems with indoor and outdoor climate conditions seen in New Zealand.

The airtightness of 36 houses built since 1995 and across four cities in New Zealand (NZ) was measured. In a subset of 31 of these homes, the average ventilation rate was measured over several weeks in the winter using a perfluorocarbon tracer technique (PFT). These results can be added to earlier airtightness data to provide a platform for improving the air quality and energy efficiency of residential ventilation in NZ.