IEQ measurement and assessment tools for Plug-and-Play deep renovation in buildings

Abstract

This paper presents the approach developed for the monitoring and assessment of Indoor Environmental Quality (IEQ) in the whole deep renovation process aimed at reducing energy consumptions and improving comfort. The research was performed by the P2Endure project, that aims to provide scalable, adaptable and ready-to-implement prefabricated Plug-and-Play systems for deep renovation of building envelopes and technical systems. The idea is to use IEQ as one of the design criteria supporting the decision-making process, included into the holistic renovation process developed by P2Endure and called “4M: Mapping-Modelling- Making-Monitoring”. For this reason, a set of Key Performance Indicators (KPI) was selected, with the consequent measurement and calculation methodologies. The KPIs are collected and showed together with the analysis of the different IEQ dimensions (thermal and indoor air quality). The data collection has been investigated extensively, taking into account all possible data sources, measurements and surveys (e.g. special questionnaires for children in schools). In addition to traditional devices, the innovative Comfort Eye sensor is used in the proposed framework. This is a low-cost sensing system capable of measuring thermal comfort together with IAQ, applicable for permanent or periodic monitoring and with low disturbance for inhabitants. The overall procedure is presented, also in relation with the deep renovation process. Then, the application of the measurement and assessment tools in real demonstration cases is illustrated with initial results from the monitoring campaign.