This Home Energy classic, originally printed in 1986, explains a simple way to take one air infiltration measurement and determine a home's average air infiltration rate.
You have been using HOT2000 to determine if house designs meet the R-2000 energy target and have always believed that it does a good job. One day you decide to model your own home and compare the results to the utility bills. You find that the predicted and measured energy usage differs by a significant amount! Does this sound familiar? What's going on? Why the difference? Does this mean the utility meters are no good (unlikely); that you don't know how to perform take-offs (shudder); or that HOT2000 is no good (shriek)? Don't panic.
Balanced ·mechanical ventilation with heat recovery (MYHR) offers, in principle, a way of reducing carbon dioxide emissions from dwellings. In order for such systems to produce a clear reduction in C02 it is necessary for the emissions from the low temperature heat saved to exceed those from the electricity used to drive them. This condition places a lower limit on the coefficient of performance (COP) of MYHR systems, which in the UK is around 3. The major variable in system performance is the electrical input to the fans.
In Sweden there are close to 500000 one-family houses heated by electric baseboard heaters. Of them 90 % were built before 1980. In this group the most common ventilation system is natural ventilation. Half of all houses 'with electric baseboard heaters were built between 1971 and 1980. The Swedish Council for Building Research has been asked by the Swedish government to carry out a program concerning the efficient use of electricity in buildings.
New Best Practice programme publications from the Energy Efficiency Office provide the building industry with guidance on construction design for well insulated new houses, writes Peter Barton-Wood, BRECSU
The Canadian Code for Energy Efficiency in New Houses will feature prescribed thermal characteristics of the envelope components of houses. These will be selected primarily on the basis of life cycle cost. A new method was developed to perform the life cycle cost evaluations of energy efficiency options for walls, roofs, windows and basement walls, based on their performance within the energy system of a house. Existing analytic techniques were adapted to perform the energy analysis and life cycle cost calculations.
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