Canada

A demonstration house was previously built and commissioned in Iqaluit, Nunavut, Canada. The purpose of the overall effort is to evaluate the performance of a high-performance building located in the Canadian Arctic, while considering the unique social, economic and logistical challenges associated with its remote location. Previous work consisted of monitoring and reporting on the energy consumption due to heating between April 2016 and April 2017.

The Arctic environment is challenging for housing ventilation and heating systems. Energy consumption and demand for space heating for northern remote community residential buildings are very high. Airtight built northern homes require energy efficient and effective ventilation systems to maintain acceptable indoor air quality and comfort, and to protect the building envelope from moisture damage.

Health Canada’s cross-Canada residential radon survey report from 2012 demonstrated that roughly 7% of Canadian homes contain radon levels above the Canadian guideline of 200 Bq/m3. The research outlined in this paper evaluates the effect of ventilation rates on radon levels in two homes located in Ontario, Canada. The first case study consisted of short-term (2 day) radon monitoring in a home using three ventilation strategies; one heat recovery ventilator (HRV) running, two HRVs running, and both HRVs turned off.

The new schools in Canada are designed to improve indoor environment quality while achieving a much better energy performance than the code compliance requirements.  

Natural ventilation (NV) is an efficient way of cooling buildings, and its energy saving potentials however depend on many parameters including local hourly weather and climate conditions, types of ventilations, indoor cooling loads (or heat gains), operating schedules, window types, and opening-wall ratios etc. Determination of the NV flow rate is thus challenging, although there are many empirical equations for different NV strategies, e.g. single-sided and cross-ventilation, considering different driving forces, e.g. wind, buoyancy and a mix of both.