Smart ventilation energy and indoor air quality performance in residential buildings: A review

To better address energy and indoor air quality issues, ventilation needs to become smarter. A key smart ventilation concept is to use controls to ventilate more at times it provides either an energy or indoor air quality (IAQ) advantage (or both) and less when it provides a disadvantage. A favorable context exists in many countries to include some of the existing smart ventilation strategies in codes and standards. As a result, demand-controlled ventilation (DCV) systems are widely and easily available on the market, with more than 20 DCV systems approved and available in countries such as Belgium, France and the Netherlands. This paper provides a literature review on smart ventilation used in residential buildings, based on energy and indoor air quality performance. This meta-analysis includes 38 studies of various smart ventilation systems with control based on CO2, humidity, combined CO2 and total volatile organic compounds (TVOC), occupancy, or outdoor temperature. These studies show that ventilation energy savings up to 60% can be obtained without compromising IAQ, even sometimes improving it. However, the meta-analysis included some less than favorable results, with 26% energy overconsumption in some cases.