Passive stack ventilation systems have been used for a number of years throughout the world. They were specifically mentioned within the 1995 revision of the Building Regulations for England and Wales as a means of compliance. BRE Information Paper 13/94 gives recommendations for the design of duct systems within dwellings that place restrictions upon the number and severity of bends that may be used. These restrictions limit the scope for the use of passive stack ventilation within dwellings.
Remedial measures to prevent soil gas infiltration have been implemented on many buildings affected by intrusion of radon, water vapour, methane and other volatile organic compounds (VOCs ). The success of these measures has been well documented for gases such as radon; however similar detailed documentation was not readily available for methane or other vocs. The objective of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of four different remedial solutions installed on houses. All houses tested in this study had the potential of methane intrusion.
A Probabilistic model of air change rate in a single family house based on full-scale measurements has been developed. The probability of air change rate exceeding certain prescribed limits (risk of improper ventilation or excessive heat flow) is evaluated by utilising the distribution function based on calculated air flow rate. In this way the results are expressed in terms of the R-S model generally used in the safety analysis of structures.
A study of the reliability of systems by considering the ability of different systems to maintain a required air flow rate over time is included in a subtask of IEA Annex 27 "Evaluation and Demonstration of Domestic Ventilation Systems". Measurements and calculations were performed to determine the variation in ventilation rates due to variation in climate and variation in performance of the ventilation system. Dwellings with passive stack, mechanical exhaust and mechanical exhaust-supply ventilation, representative of the Swedish housing stock, were studied.
Ad Hoc Group 4 of Working Group 2 of CEN TC156 (Ventilation) was set up to put forward standardised techniques for estimating ventilation rates in dwellings. The purpose of the standard is to ensure that different people carrying out calculations with the same input data will obtain the same result. This will allow the use of these results in energy, heating load, IAQ or other calculations. The methods proposed use two different techniques, an explicit and an implicit one. The explicit one involves more approximations, but can be carried out with a hand calculator.