Ventilative cooling of residential buildings: Strategies, measurement results and lessons learned from three active houses in Austria, Germany and Denmark

The thermal comfort of the residential buildings Home for Life in Denmark, LichtAktiv Haus in Germnay and Sunlighthouse in Austria is investigated with a particular focus on the strategies used to achieve good thermal comfort, and the role of solar shading and natural ventilation. The houses are three of six buildings in the Model Home 2020 project. They have generous daylight conditions, and are designed to be energy efficient and CO2 neutral with a good indoor environment. The living rooms in all three houses have high daylight levels and have been selected for the detailed analyses for this reason. The thermal environment is evaluated according to the Active House specification (based on the adaptive method of EN 15251), and it is found that the house reach category 1 for the summer situation. Some undercooling occurs in Sunlighthouse and Home for Life during winter, which is caused by occupant preferences or incomplete commissioning. It is found that ventilative cooling through window openings play a particularly important role in maintaining thermal comfort in all three houses and that both window openings and external solar shading is used frequently.