European residential ventilation: Investigating the impact on health and energy demand

The fundamental goal of building ventilation is to provide indoor conditions conducive to occupant health with low energy use. However, given the dynamic interplay of indoor and outdoor environmental conditions, there is limited knowledge on benchmarking human health and energy performance in relation to different ventilation systems. We coupled outdoor air pollution and meteorological data from 9 European cities with building energy simulations to investigate the effect of residential ventilation on indoor air quality, Disability-Adjusted Life Years (DALYs), and energy demand. Examining five representative ventilation systems, each operating under three distinct ventilative cooling (VC) scenarios, our findings reveal that PM2.5 accounted for the majority of DALYs (∼94 %). Filtering outdoor air in accordance with the standards reduced DALYs on average by ∼37 %. In the presence of filtration, VC based on indoor-outdoor temperatures increased DALYs by ∼10 %. However, a more comprehensive VC control based on both indoor-outdoor temperatures and outdoor air pollution did not increase DALYs. Overall, demand-controlled mechanical ventilation with energy recovery, outdoor air filtration, and VC resulted in the lowest energy demand and DALYs. Our results suggest that considering both indoor and outdoor environmental parameters can improve the performance of residential ventilation in terms of health and energy.