Fifty six office buildings in nine European countries were audited during the heating season of 1993-1994 using an agreed upon procedure to investigate the indoor air quality and energy consumption. The results of this IAQ-Audit project show that the largest indoor pollution sources in office buildings are construction materials furnishings and indoor activities, immediately followed by the HV AC systems themselves. Thus, priority must be given to source control.
How do tenants of public housing respond to retrofits to improve their comfort and energy use during the cooling season? In contrast to retrofits to improve heating or lighting, cooling retrofits have been little studied, despite extensive programs by utilities and housing authorities to reduce this end use. A local utility and a housing authority have been retrofitting their buildings with evaporative coolers, ground-source heatpumps and other cooling measures.
Many dwellings with natural or gravity ventilation systems suffer from poor airchange rates. In Sweden, especially houses built in the 1960-ies and 1970-ies heated with electric resistance heating and thus without chimneys, are at risk. Improving the airchange rate in these houses is to some extent performed to decrease Radon gas concentrations where appropriate. For comfort, most homeowners learn to live with low airchange rates, accepting e.g. odours or window condensation and trying to compensate this with increased airing.
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