Are Design Strategies for High-Performance Buildings Really Effective? Results from One Year of Monitoring of Indoor Microclimate and Envelope Performance of a Newly Built nZEB House in Central Italy

Abstract

As buildings are one of the major contributors to greenhouse gas emissions and energy consumption, they have a key potential for energy efficiency and indoor environmental quality improvement. Therefore, the development of nearly Zero-Energy Buildings (nZEBs) is strategic to respond to these challenges and to design and retrofit sustainable highly performing buildings. Actually, the nZEB target can also be reached with highly insulated wooden technologies. However, they must be critically revised and adapted when taking into account the warm climate peculiarities. The paper contributes to this attempt by dealing with the implementation of a methodology specifically focused on the long-term assessment of the real building envelope performance. The methodology is applied to a recently built wooden nZEB detached single-story dwelling constructed in 2017 in central Italy. One year monitoring data were collected about the envelope in-field dynamic performance and the indoor microclimate and well-being conditions. The theoretical design-stage data and the monitored data were compared. The positive aspects as well as the critical issues of nZEB target in the Mediterranean climate context and the performance gap were underlined. Accordingly, the main aspects to be considered in the design of nZEBs envelope were highlighted.

Building Information Modeling and Digital Twin Approaches in Building Automation and Distributed IoT Networks – Review and New Challenges Discussion

“…In the first decade of the 2000s, the EN 15232 standard "Energy performance of buildings -Impact of Building Automation, Controls and Building Management" was developed, which was updated several times. His last version from 2017 [14] introduces four categories of BACS, marked with letters from A to D, depending on their impact on a building's energy efficiency as it is shown in Figure 5 [106,107]. It must be noted that these categories differ from the energy efficiency classes of entire buildings, as defined in EN 15217 standard.…”