IEA EBC annex 86 on “Energy Efficient Smart IAQ Management for residential buildings"

This new annex was approved in June 2020. The goal of Annex 86 is to propose an integrated rating method for the performance assessment and optimization of energy efficient strategies of managing the indoor air quality (IAQ) in new and existing residential buildings. This integrated performance assessment will accelerate the development of better and more energy efficient IAQ management strategies to address rapidly changing expectations of the home environment due to challenges such as peak oil, climate change or pandemics.

To achieve this, we are gathering the existing scientific knowledge and data on pollution sources in buildings, looking at the opportunities that spring from the rise of IoT connected sensors, studying current and innovative use cases of IAQ management strategies and developing road maps to ensure the continuous performance of the proposed solutions over their lifetime.

In the annex, experts from different fields including mechanical engineering, building science, chemistry, data science and environmental health work together with other stakeholders towards consensus on the basic assumptions that underlie such a performance assessment and develop practical guidelines and tools to bring the results to practice.

The annex is now in its 1-year preparation phase and will start its 3-year operation phase in June 2021. The 6-monthly expert meetings will be held in connection with the AIVC conferences and events to limit travel, provided in-person meetings are possible. In the other case, a series of short conference-calls and webinars will be organised.

We currently have participants from Austria, Belgium, Chile, China, Denmark, France, Ireland, New Zealand, Switzerland, the UK and the USA. We actively invite all other IEA-EBC member countries to participate. A minimum commitment of 3 person-months of labour in research activities relevant for the annex for each year of the Annex term will be required for participation, as well as a commitment to participate in the expert meeting. Interested research groups / companies can contact the operating agent (jelle.laverge@ugent.be) or their country representative in the IEA-EBC Executive Committee (https://www.iea-ebc.org/contacts).