Smart Ventilation Performance Durability Assessment: Preliminary Results from a Long-Term Residential Monitoring of Humidity-based Demand-Controlled Ventilation

Humidity-based DCV systems have been widely used in France for 35 years and are considered as a reference system, including for low-energy residential buildings. The on-going Performance 2 project delivers the preliminary results of a thirteen-year monitoring in thirty social housing apartments.
The initial project was a large-scale monitoring on thirty new occupied apartments equipped with this DCV system, which extended from 2007 to 2009. The equipment included IAQ sensors in different rooms of each dwelling (temperature, humidity, and CO2), as well as pressure and volume flow sensors for monitoring the ventilation system. Recordings were performed every minute over two years. This former study showed: The good IAQ in terms of CO2 and humidity, a good correlation between CO2 and airflows, savings on heat losses of 30 % in average compared to regulatory constant airflows.
Thirteen years later the building is re-visited, and the monitoring system is turned back on with the intention to assess the ventilation system performance after a prolonged in-situ functioning period.
In this article, we analyse the literature in order to discuss the choice of humidity as a relevant parameter to control ventilation, and we present the results from the first heating period.
These first promising results will be followed by: the collection of the ventilation devices for laboratory tests and a new set-up for each apartment including TVOC, formaldehyde and particle sensors to follow the latest interests of IAQ research.
In the context of the increasing awareness about smart ventilation, these feedbacks highlight as a crucial issue, the durability of the ventilation systems and its components (including the sensors) and their robustness to a lack of maintenance or even a bad use by occupants.