In recent years plants have increasingly become an integral part of building interior design. Greened office space and large enclosures can provide a better human environment not only because of psychological reasons. Due to photosynthesis, plants interact with the "aerial" environment. Water evaporation aflects room air humidity and temperature. Water uptake rates offive common plants in typical indoor climate conditions have been studied. Water evaporation of these plants can now be predicted in architectural design studies.
The reason for the present project is the need for more reliable information about the actual ventilation conditions in naturally ventilated, detached houses. The aim has been to quantify the ventilation and humidity conditions and to establish a better basis for elaborating directions and guidelines on proper ventilation of detached houses. A national questionnaire survey covering more than 2100 households has been carried out, together with detailed investigations in about 150 houses.
This paper reports on the findings from two extensive laboratory studies of ventilation of bathrooms of different sizes and layout of ventilation. The ventilation flow rates were varied. Moisture production were due to laundering and shower baths. In one of the studies the bathroom was provided with a drying cabinet. The extract air was forced to pass through the drying cabinet which was connected to the extract ventilation system of the house by a duct running from the cabinet to the extract air terminal device.
A possible alternative to mechanical extract ventilation for kitchens and bathrooms is passive stack ventilation (PSV). BRE has carried out work on this type of system in a test house under controlled conditions. To find out how well they worked in practice, four occupied dwellings were monitored over a period of 2 - 3 weeks each. Each dwelling had two ventilation ducts. Air flow rates within the ventilation ducts were measured, together with humidities, temperatures and climatological data.
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