VIP 29: An overview of national trends in envelope and ductwork airtightness

This paper summarises presentations and discussions that took place during the workshop entitled “ Trends in national building ventilation markets and drivers for change” held in Ghent, Belgium, in march 2008 with a specific focus on envelope and ductwork airtightness. Before this workshop, experts were asked to provide information regarding the trends in ventilation in their country and the difficulties they felt to improve the situation in terms of market penetration of innovative systems, indoor air quality and energy use requirements, and compliance check schemes. This has resulted in a body of literature published as Information Papers which can be downloaded from the EPBD buildings platform. Based mostly on these papers and on the workshop discussions, this paper starts summarising energy savings estimates and energy regulation measures ; it continues with a number of issues that have been stressed by the experts such as indoor air quality impacts, airflows through insulation layers, airtightness databases and metrics, and finally, ways to explore to achieve good airtightness.