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Nowadays, important efforts are made to reduce the residential building energy consumption. In this context, a growing interest for heat recovery ventilation has been observed during the last decades. The present paper focuses on a new single room ventilation with heat recovery. Double flow ventilation is achieved through the integration of the unit into windows ledges. The developed device is particularly suitable compared to traditional centralized heat recovery ventilation units for retrofitted houses due to the absence of air extracting and air pulsing ducts through the house.
The first part of the paper consists in describing the characteristics and properties of the developed device (volume, components, flow configuration, advantages and drawbacks).
In the second part of the paper, an experimental approach is presented to characterize the unit. The criteria of performance are based on:
- Thermal effectiveness of the unit (testing of a recovery heat exchanger),
- Hydraulic aspects (flows delivered by the unit vs energy supplied to the unit),
- Acoustic aspects.
The overall performance of the unit can be established based on the experimental results described here above. Cartography of performance (ratio between the recovered heat and the supply electrical power) can be drawn, depending on the flow rates delivered by the unit and the indoor/outdoor temperature difference.
The last part of the paper compares the new system with natural, simple exhaust ventilation and traditional centralized systems in terms of primary energy, consumer price and carbon dioxide emissions. Results show that the presented device seems more competitive than natural and simple exhaust ventilation for the Belgian climate. The single room ventilation investigated in this paper also shows better performance than most of the centralized ventilation systems tested on site.