residential building

The greater availability of information and telecommunication technologies and the trend towards flexible working practices allow the home and the workplace to coexist. Many studies mainly emphasize economic and social consequences of teleworking. However, there is no assessment of energy and indoor climate impact of teleworking at home. Furthermore a professional activity is usually not envisaged at home, and home is not built according to the same building design process as offices. Consequently, teleworking at home raises new questions about the evolution of dwellings.

In summer, it is possible to achieve a satisfactory comfort in residential buildings with purely passive means as thermal inertia, possibility of cross ventilation and solar protection of the external envelope. These parameters have to be taken into account at the earliest stages of building design.

This paper examines historical data on Government expenditure on grants for home energy efficiency improvements, and the effect that this had on the uptake of insulation measures. The analysis focuses on loft insulation, this being the main measure that has been targeted by grant schemes. The paper shows that variations in loft insulation uptake between 197 4 and 1996 were closely tied to changes to grant schemes. Furthermore, there is a clear correlation between the uptake rate achieved and the level of funding provided by the Government.

In a cold climate such as of Montreal the air infiltration through the exterior envelope of a house has a significant impact on the heating energy consumption and cost. Although the reduction of the air infiltration rate to the level of new well-built houses can lead to the reduction of heating energy cost, the present cost-effectiveness of its implementation in the existing houses is low. The evaluation of the environmental impact of this energy conservation measure is performed using the GWP (Global Warming Potential) index.

Two energy-efficient single-family houses (known as ESPI houses) with competitive overallcosts were set up during the study in Finland. The consumption of energy for room heating inESPI houses was reduced to a half at the construction stage, by employing simple solutionswhich can be used by every builder. The level of thermal insulation of the houses wasimproved remarkably. The houses were equipped with a controlled ventilation system and anefficient exhaust air heat recovery unit. One of the houses was oil heated and the other waselectrically heated.

The light well located in the center of high-rise apartment building in Japan is called "Void". Gas water-heaters settled in Void discharge the exhaust gas into Void so that the enough opening area has to be designed at the bottom of Void to keep the IAQ in Void. In order to secure the IAQ in Void, a simple zonal model to calculate the ventilation rate induced by the wind force and the thermal buoyancy through openings at the bottom of Void with heat sources like water heaters is presented. And the accuracy of this calculation method is examined by wind tunnel test.

Until now, there is no widely accepted way to express any index for this purpose and taking into account the large variety of possible pollutants. Things can be simplified if the aim is to compare different systems and strategies rather than to give an absolute value of quality. For the study of a pollutant source, the main important point for comparison is the pattern of its production, whatever this pollutant is. The detailed data for each inhabitant is the curve of the number of hours above a pollutant level concentration Ci: Nh (Ci).

A systematic analysis of recently constructed dwellings in the Flemish Region has been undertaken within the SENVIVV-project (1995-1998). In total 200 dwellings have been examined in detail. The study involved various aspects: energy related building data (thermal insulation level, net heating demand, installed heating power, .. ), indoor climate (temperature levels in winter and summer), building airtightness, ventilation, appreciation of the occupants, . . . This paper especially focuses on the results for thermal insulation, airtightness and ventilation.

Under the conditions that the air in each room is in the state of perfect mixing and ventilation is in steady state, a method to estimate steady state concentration distribution to match an arbitrary contaminant generation distribution is proposed, using concentration data obtained from short-time tracer gas experiment. Also, a method is proposed, which is used to estimate ventilation rate by adding other available equations.