residential ventilation

The indoor climate in residential buildings is affected by the people that live in the house and their activities. One of the goals of a ventilation system is to prevent excess humidity in the house by removing part of the moisture. The moisture balance can however be distorted in winter with a low humidity in the house as a result.

Whole-house ventilation systems are becoming commonplace in new construction, remodeling/renovation, and weatherization projects, driven by combinations of specific requirements for indoor air quality (IAQ), health, and compliance with standards, such as ASHRAE 62.2. At the same time we wish to reduce the energy use in homes and therefore minimize the energy used to provide ventilation. This study examined several approaches to reducing the energy requirements of providing acceptable IAQ in residential buildings. Two approaches were taken.

The goal of this study was to develop a Residential Integrated Ventilation Controller (RIVEC) to reduce the energy impact of required mechanical ventilation by 20%, maintain or improve indoor air quality and provide demand response benefits. This represents potential energy savings of about 140 GWh of electricity and 83 million therms of natural gas as well as proportional peak savings in California.

The monitoring of a demand controlled heat recovery ventilation system with ground heat exchange in a zero-energy building in Groenlo, The Netherlands, revealed interesting practical insights.

This paper presents an investigation into solutions for the system design of a centralized DCV system in multi-family dwellings. The design focused on simple and inexpensive solutions. A cost benefit estimate showed that the initial cost of implementing DCV in a system with an efficient heat exchanger should not exceed 3400 DKK per dwelling in regions with weather conditions similar to the Danish climate. A design expected to fulfil this requirement was investigated in detail with regard to its electricity consumption by evaluation of different control strategies.

This paper addresses the issue of the compliance of residential ventilation systems with building regulations. Because the French building code includes requirements on performance as well as on means, the approach adopted by the French government consists in checking both airflow rates and functional measures. This paper gives an overview of the methods used and analyses the results of tests performed on 260 building projects (multi-family buildings and grouped individual houses).

An idea to build a demonstration house fitted with a hybrid ventilation system arose when Brno University of Technology joined the RESHYVENT project. There has not been much attention paid to the residential ventilation in the Czech Republic. Window airing and passive stack ventilation are still the most common ways of ventilation in residential buildings. In this context a decision was made to build a house equipped with a demand controlled hybrid ventilation system.