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Despite a lot of Integrated Design Process guidelines and procedures have been developed in the last few years, more specific energy design procedures are needed to push the implementation of passive design techniques.

This article deals with summer comfort and room air distribution in low-energy housings. In such buildings, the efficient thermal insulation and air tightness make it crucial to efficiently dispose of the heat released by the internal gains. In this prospect, the comfort in a test room resulting from an integrated cooling and ventilation system is assessed both experimentally and numerically. The air is supplied into the room close to the ceiling through a wall-mounted diffuser of complex geometry composed of 12 lobed nozzles.

Diffuse ceiling ventilation is a novel air distribution device that combines the suspended acoustic ceiling with ventilation supply. A diffuse ceiling distributes the supply air above the acoustic tiles and has proven performance in laboratory experiments. To study the performance in real conditions a classroom was retrofitted with mechanical ventilation and a diffuse ceiling. The employed ceiling comprises active panels penetrable to air and impenetrable passive panels.

The stock housing of England (UK) constitutes the oldest housing stocks in the world. Indeed, 63 per cent of all dwellings were built before 1960s and thus most of the people in the UK live in an old house or at least a house that is more than 50 years old. The most common dwelling types in the UK are the semi-detached and terraced houses, and particularly within deprived communities. In deprived communities, houses suffer from poor indoor conditions and building standards of energy performance.

by space and water heating. The high costs of energy are a national matter not only for their economic and environmental implications, but also because they contribute largely to a social problem, known as fuel poverty. The cost of heating the housing stock is rather high for different reasons, one of each being the heat loss through the building envelope. The thermal performance of existing buildings can be increased in two ways: by adding insulation to external fabric, and by reducing the unintended air leaks of the envelope.

French standard for airtightness measurements is NF EN 13829. It is completed by French application guide GA P50-784, to set calibration rules more precisely, among other issues. This guide was published in 2010. To answer measurers’ remaining questions, a Frequently Asked Questions web site was created by CETE de Lyon.

In France, starting January 1st, 2013, the energy performance regulation will impose an airtightness treatment for every new residential building. This translates into several tens if not hundreds of thousands of envelope airtightness measurements a year that will have to be performed. They will have to be performed by a certified operator and according to the NF EN 13829 standard. This ISO standard is being revised under the Vienna agreement to become an EN ISO standard.

The energy consumption needed for establishing a good indoor climate in shopping centres is often very high due to high internal heat loads from lighting and equipment and from a high people density at certain time intervals. This heat surplus result in a need for cooling during most of the year, typically also during the winter, and often the needed cooling is provided by a mechanical ventilation system with integrated mechanical cooling.

Hybrid ventilation (HV), as a combination of automated natural ventilation (NV) and balanced mechanical ventilation (MV), provides opportunities to use the advantages of both ventilation systems during the seasons in order to reduce energy demand and at the same time obtain comfortable indoor climate.

The UK Government strategy for all new homes to be built to zero carbon standards by 2016 is based upon a “fabric first” approach to design. This means prioritising energy efficiency improvements to the building envelope through: increasing overall levels of insulation; reducing thermal bridging; and making buildings more airtight. However, recent research has raised concerns about the standards that are actually achieved in the construction of new housing.