Reduced energy use in buildings through selection of low-emitting building materials and furniture

To quantify this potential the relationships between ventilation rate and indoor air quality perceived by humans were established for rooms furnished with different categories of polluting materials and simulations of energy used for ventilation were carried out. The relationships were established by summarizing existing data reported in the literature and by a series of new experiments. The simulations of energy used for ventilation were carried out using BSim software. During simulations the ventilation rate was varied to obtain different levels of air quality as if low-polluting building materials had been used. The results show that the ventilation requirements to achieve a certain level of indoor air quality vary depending on how much pollution is emitted from different buidling materials. They also show that indoor air quality can be considerable improved when low-polluting building materials are selected, the effect of using low-polluting building materials being higher than a realistic increase of the ventilation rate. The energy simulation indicates that selecting low-polluting materials will result in a considerable energy saving as a result of reducing the ventilation rates - halving the ventilation rate can reduce the energy used for ventilation by up to 50%. The selection of low-polluting building materials makes it possible to reduce ventilation requirements significantly without compromising the perceived indoor air quality, thereby reducing the energy required to run ventilation systems. The energy savings of úsing low-polluting building materials are however limited by the extent to which ventilation is used to control the thermal environment, i.e. heating and/or cooling. Future studies shoulds validate the present results in the field and investigate how emissions from humans affect ventilation requirements as as other low-energy consuming methods for imrpoving the indoor air quality.