Status and recommendations for better implementation of ventilative cooling in standards, legislation and compliance tools

This summary report presents insights on recommendations into how ventilative cooling is integrated in EN standards, ISO standards, national standards, national legislation and national compliance tools. The information presented derives from feedback by IEA EBC Annex 62 experts of 11 countries (see Table 1) who have completed a questionnaire. This gives a high level of insight into the current status, and thereby the recommendations to be given on the basis of this knowledge. The Venticool background report on recommendations is the background for this IEA EBC Annex 62 summary report and should be seen as supplementary material for the State-of-the-Art Review (SOTAR). Natural ventilative cooling, is difficult to assess in most existing compliance tools. Several building simulation tools are available today, allowing architects or engineers to assess buildings with a high accuracy on energy performance or indoor climate. Some of them are already implementing modules to consider natural ventilation through windows and its effect on thermal summer comfort. Nevertheless, even though some of these tools have reached an elevated level of user-friendliness, they are only occasionally used for building design as the compliance of a project with building regulation also requires the use of calculation tools. Therefore, these so-called “compliance tools” are usually preferred in the design process of a building to secure the performance of buildings and their compatibility with national regulations. The summary report on recommendations is oriented to building designers, builders and experts working with building energy performance standards, legislations and compliance tools. It aims to support them when making future revisions of these documents or tools dealing with passive cooling, where e.g. ventilative cooling is a sustainable choice when aiming to achieve energy neutral buildings (e.g. NZEB), alongside buildings with a good thermal comfort and reduced overheating issues.