Comparison of the performance of a whole house low energy ventilation system in contrasting european climatic regions
‘Comparison of the Performance of a Whole House Low Energy Ventilation System in Contrasting European Climatic Regions’, with R Southall, in Building Services Engineering Research and Technology vol. 26 (3) (London: CIBSE 9/2005) pp 213-227. ISSN 0143-6244
This refereed paper is a summary description of the project to demonstrate the EU funded installation of the Dwell-Vent whole house, low energy, ventilation system in houses and flats at different locations in Poland, Ireland and Denmark.
My work is principally in the area of ecological building component development, in collaboration with Dr Ryan Southall from the University of Brighton, this is one of a series on this topic that have been the outcome from the several funded research projects I’ve coordinated.
I founded Dwell-Vent Ltd, with Ryan Southall, in October 2005 as a campus start-up company to bring the technology into the mainstream. It has achieved considerable early market exposure in Ireland as a result of the demonstration project described in this paper.
The Dwell-Vent system is the result of combining ‘supply air’ windows with ‘passive stacks’. The principal behind the extremely efficient insulation and ventilation characteristics of the ‘supply air’ window have been known for a long time as a result of research carried out in Finland and Canada. What we did, for the first time, was to combine the windows with passive stacks to create a ventilation system incorporating heat reclaim but without the use of electricity. The UK drive towards zero carbon construction and the changing legislative context are making the Dwell-Vent concept both timely and of considerable interest to the construction industry. Over the past year I have given CPD (Continuing Professional Development) presentations to leading architectural practices in London, exhibited at major London building component exhibitions, and the technology has been widely reported in the press both here and in Ireland. Dwell-Vent was a finalist in this year’s Carbon Trust Innovation Awards, and was a prize winner at the Ashden Awards for Energy presented by Al Gore in April 2007.
The EU 5th Framework funding that paid for the installations described in this paper, enabled further work to be carried out in the UK. A pilot project saw the Dwell-Vent system installed in two houses in Norwich, and most recently in 20 houses and flats, also in Norfolk, and supported by a grant from the Carbon Trust. We have most recently begun a study entitled ‘AVASH’ funded by the EU Intelligent Energy in Europe programme. AVASH has partners, once again in Ireland, Denmark and Poland, and entails an energy and air-tightness survey of existing housing in the three countries. This is to evaluate the application of high performance ventilation solutions throughout the domestic building stock.
F Karlsson’s “Multi-dimensional approach used for energy and indoor climate evaluation applied to a low energy building", Linkoping Studies in Science and Technology, 2006:1065, Division of Energy Systems, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Linkoping University, Sweden.
