Construction and set-up of a full-scale experimental house for ventilation studies

This paper reports on the construction, experimental set up and infiltration characteristics of a purpose built full-scale experimental house. The building has been designed as an experimental platform for measuring the moisture removal effectiveness of active and passive ventilation systems with indoor and outdoor climate conditions seen in New Zealand.
The two bedroom building was purchased as a pre-fabricated shell and moved onto the testing site. The inner wall lining was then airtightened following the Canadian “airtight drywall” approach to achieve less than 1 n50 (air changes per hour under a pressure difference of 50Pa). We then installed ventilation ports in walls, floor and ceiling so that the airtightness can be adjusted between 1 and 10 N50 to cover the current range of new housing in New Zealand. The building is equipped with temperature, relative humidity probes and multi-tracer gas equipment to track inter zonal air and moisture flows.
Early work has measured infiltration rates at four levels of airtightness, some of which are compared to infiltration rates calculated using a zonal model of the building.