Long Term Results New Construction Occupied Test House Urbana Illinois

TO2 3.4.2: Eval. of NC Packages - Urbana, IL

The Passive House Building Energy Standard is gaining popularity in the United States as a goal for architects and builders to design and construct buildings with very low energy consumption (15 kWh/m2 yr thermal heating or cooling, 120 kWh/m2 yr whole-house source energy). Although there is extensive performance data gathered from buildings constructed in Europe, very little data from buildings constructed in the United States exists to assess the detailed energy consumption and occupant comfort characteristics of completed Passive Houses.
The house in this study was designed and built to the Passive House Building Energy Standard incorporating an airtight, super-insulated thermal enclosure and predominantly southern facing windows with calculated overhangs and trellises to provide shading during the summer and maximized solar gain during the winter. A single point mini-split heat pump and electric resistance heaters provide space conditioning, and a balanced energy recovery ventilator (ERV) provides ventilation. The house was extensively instrumented with sub-metering on all major electrical circuits, temperature and humidity measurements in each room, domestic hot water consumption, and recovery efficiency of the ERV. This two-year study intended to document the energy performance of the house in each sub-metered area and compare the performance to modeled predictions and to assess the thermal comfort performance of the single point mini-split heat pump. This report discusses several performance characteristics discovered during the study.