Awareness of the need for energy efficient houses has never been so high, but are low energy dwellings delivering the performance they promised, or are comfort levels rising?
This paper examines the contribution that energy efficiency in residential buildings can make towards meeting the UK government' s commitment to reduce the country's C02 emissions by 20% relative to 1990 levels by the year 2010. It is based on work carried out by the authors and their colleagues, funded by the UK Electricity Association. Following a bottom-up modelling approach, the technological options available for use in residential buildings in the UK have been assessed.
All countries have a common obligation regarding environmental issues. Mature market economies still have problems with market imperfections and countries with markets in transition have not yet fully developed the institutions to make use of the market mechanisms. Both market function, institutions and policies must develop to achieve market transformation both in a national and an international context.
While there is no convincing technical basis for current code requirements for crawl space ventilation, most codes still require operable vents and the practice is well established among builders and architects . While the evidence against venting is compelling to many if not most in the research community builders and code officials apparently want to see hard evidence. In this research project I measured weekly energy consumption for space heating for a 1150 square foot home in a climate with 5900 heating degree days.
Ventilation systems for residential buildings can be generally categorized as supply, exhaust, or balanced systems. Subcategories include: integration into central air distribution ducts, or single- or multipoint air distribution; This effort focused on establishing a design methodology for central-fan-integrated supply ventilation systems using an outside air duct to the return side of a central air distribution fan, with a specialized fan recycling control.
This paper proposes a new approach to thermostat design. For many years, thermostats have been "dumb" devices, meaning that they react to their environment either by direct user control or by previous user programming. This new approach details an intelligent thermostat that learns about the behavior of the occupants and their environment and controls ambient temperature to maintain comfort according to human specifications. In that way, the thermostat reduces the number of interactions with the user and eliminates the need for them to learn how to program the device.
Energy Comfort 2000 is a THERMIB supported Target project in which seven non-domestic buildings have been designed, built and are being monitored. An eighth building was designed but unfortunately has not finally been built. All are Passive and Low Energy buildings, designed to avoid or minimise the use of air-conditioning, by using the architectural design and construction of the building to produce adequate internal comfort conditions. Overall energy consumption is calculated to be less than 50% compared with traditional buildings and early monitoring has confirmed these predictions.
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