DOE OSTI2013
Over the years, building scientists have characterized the relationship between building airtightness, exhaust-only appliances airflows, and building depressurization. Now, as the use of deep retrofit measures and new construction practices is growing to realize lower infiltration levels in increasingly tighter envelopes, performance issues can arise with the operation of exhaust-only appliances in a depressurized home. As the depressurization levels climb in tighter homes, many of these exhaust-only appliances see their rated airflows reduced and other related performance issues arise as a result. If sufficiently depressurized, atmospherically vented combustion appliances that may be present in the home can backdraft as well. Furthermore, when exhaust-only appliances operate and the tight home becomes depressurized, water vapor intrusion from outdoors can raise additional issues of mold in the building envelope in more humid climates. The use of energy recovery ventilators (ERVs) in tight homes in mixed-humid and hot-humid climates is already practiced. Unbalancing the ERV by reducing exhaust airflows can provide a means to supply makeup air and reduce the level of home depressurization to mitigate these issues, helping to realize the rated performance of the exhaust-only appliances, achieve safe operation of atmospherically vented combustion, provide the necessary level of fresh ventilation air, and/or improve envelope durability. The unbalanced operation of the ERV to address depressurization can obviously result in unintended consequences in other areas, such as further loss of humidity control in homes in more humid climates. In such tight home scenarios, it is expected that ERVs will operate a substantial amount of time in unbalanced mode with much higher supply than exhaust airflows. Although ERV design performance under balanced flow conditions is well documented, there is no information in the public domain that empirically establishes the effect of unbalanced flow on sensible and latent exchange, especially in the now dominant membrane-type ERV used in residential applications. Therefore, in this task, Gas Technology Institute (GTI) focused on a laboratory evaluation of the unbalanced flow (lowered exhaust airflow) performance of the RenewAire model EV 200, membrane-type ERV delivering 200 standard cubic feet per minute (SCFM) of supply air. The conducted tests show significant variation in ERV effectiveness at different levels of unbalanced air flows. Keeping supply airflow constant and lowering exhaust airflow increases effectiveness of both latent and sensible heat exchange. However, the increased effectiveness is accompanied by reduced capacity for load removal from the supply air, resulting in increased load to the conditioned space. Under decreasing exhaust airflow conditions, sensible load effectiveness exceeded a value of 1 at two sets of testing conditions. This was a result of the temperature rise of the supply air passing through the ERV augmented by the effect of motor heat gain, cross leakage heat gain, and casing heat gain. Consequently, measured sensible effectiveness must be qualified as the so-called Apparent Sensible Effectiveness of the ERV unit (the term used in the Canadian Standards Association C439 standard for testing ERVs).
32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗