Evaluation of Ventilation and IAQ Parameters Measured in Social Housing in Madrid

Within this paper, an evaluation of Indoor Air Quality in residential buildings, and the experience after a building retrofit is shown. One residential building in a Madrid social housing neighbourhood serves as case study and base for the monitoring. 
During the last decades, increasingly in the last years, energy conservation in buildings has become a major concern, as it represents an important share of the global energy use and contributes a great deal the GHG global emissions. This concern leads to promote retrofitting actions in buildings to improve their envelope thermal behaviour and reduce energy demand for HVAC. These retrofits affect the indoor air quality conditions as they change the original configuration of the building, including the ventilation systems. Occupant behaviour and material emissions are main sources of indoor environment pollutants. Atmospheric environment represents also a major challenge in big cities, as the pollutant levels overcome frequently the threshold levels set up in international regulations. Indoor environment quality is affected clearly by all the aforementioned factors, and residential buildings are especially sensitive to all of them as regulations have been less strict for this important building stock. Within this paper, an evaluation of the actual transient indoor air quality conditions depending on all factors influencing is developed. This characterization of a residential unit which is established in a social housing neighbourhood in Madrid (Ciudad de los Angeles), an area which has been object of a deep retrofit process during the last years. Envelope improvement, which is also the most common intervention in this neighbourhood, was executed during the last year. The intervention consisted in wall cavity insulation via injecting glass wool. Indoor environment variations are analyzed and discussed. Monitoring of the indoor comfort and air quality conditions was done before and after the retrofit process. Indoor contaminant sources coming from material and human activity are considered. Actual monitoring is also considered in unoccupied and occupied units. As conclusions, the results from monitoring some aspects of IAQ will be compared to the existing regulations on residential buildings.