Model homes offer national IAQ impact results

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Public release date: 29-Sep-2006

Contact: Blair

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EurekAlert! Fri, 29 Sep 2006 1:35 PM PDT

National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2006-09/nios-mho092906.php

Model homes offer national IAQ impact results

Airborne contaminants in homes can range from allergic agents such

as mold to potentially lethal threats such as carbon monoxide.

Engineers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology

(NIST) have developed a database of U.S. residential housing* to

help conduct nationwide analyses of ventilation, air cleaning or

moisture control strategies to reduce indoor air pollution.

Most people presume that the indoor air quality (IAQ) measures that

rid one house of airborne contaminants should work in a similar

house, but when it comes to ranking, on a regional or national

scale, potentially expensive residential code or construction

changes, housing and health authorities as well as homebuilders want

more than conventional wisdom and supposition. They want data, and a

lot of it. The new NIST set of more than 200 residential dwellings,

representing 80 percent of the United States housing stock, can be

combined with a computer simulation technique to determine the

impacts of IAQ interventions.

NIST developed its database of model homes from the U.S. Census

Bureau's American Housing Survey (AHS) and the U.S. Department of

Energy's (DOE) Residential Energy Consumption Survey (RSECS). They

then selected 209 dwellings as representative of 80 percent of U.S.

housing stock. The homes, grouped into four categories--detached,

attached, manufactured homes and apartments, were defined by their

age, floor area, number of floors, foundation type and existence of

a garage.

The engineers then developed floor plans for each house and created

a model of each in NIST's multizone indoor air quality and

ventilation assessment computer program, CONTAM. Analysts can use

the models to simulate and examine energy, IAQ and human exposure

issues in a particular type of dwelling or all the dwellings as a

group. Conclusions drawn from simulations with a particular house

type should be valid for similar houses on a nationwide or regional

level. The current multizone representations of the 209 dwellings

created with CONTAM are available at www.bfrl.nist.gov/IAQanalysis

along with floorplans of the buildings. The U.S. Department of

Housing and Urban Development sponsored this work.

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*A. Persily, A. Musser and D. Leber. A collection of homes to

represent the U.S. housing stock. NISTIR 7330, August 2006.