EPBD and Ventilation Requirements: Uneven Inputs and Results in European Countries

Since the 2002/91/CE EPBD was published, all European countries should making efforts in harmonizing local standards, imposing the assessment of building energy and environmental impact through a common certification procedure. Generally speaking, as a matter of fact, beside the main problem of different methods and tools adopted for evaluating the building energy balance, ventilation is still one of the controversial issues, since each country refers to different local requirements regarding the air-change rate values to be used when performing the calculation. In the framework of a wider research carried out in Politecnico di Milano regarding certification procedures used in several European countries, the same case-study building has been analyzed by adopting the different calculation methods and verifying the differences among the provided input data. The role of ventilation in the energy balance has been also tested and reported in this paper.