3 Analyses of about 90 000 Airtightness Measurements Performed in France on Residential and Non-Residential Buildings from 2008 to 2014

Adeline Bailly, Cerema DTer CE
Gaëlle Guyot, Ph.D., Cerema DTer CE
Valérie Leprince, Ph.D., PLEIAQ
Since 2008, every measurement of building envelope airtightness performed in France in order to justify an airtightness value for EP-calculation has to be performed by a qualified operator. With the introduction of the French BBC-Effinergie label in 2007 which imposed a limit value for residential buildings airtightness, and then with the application of the current French EP-regulation (RT2012) which imposes those limits to all new residential buildings, the number of qualified operators has been increasing until almost 1,000 in 2015. Each year, those qualified operators fill a database which gathers now information about 90,000 airtightness measurements on residential and non-residential buildings. The Cerema is in charge of this database and performed each year some analyses of those data. It includes 39 fields about building general information (owner, location, use, year of the construction, year of the rehabilitation), special requirements (label, certification), building main characteristics (main material, constructional type, insulation, ventilation system, heating system), measurement protocol (operator, date of measurement, measurement device, time of measurement, method), measurement input data (envelope area, floor area, volume), measurement results (CL, n, qa4, n50, uncertainties) and classification of the leaks (46 categories). In a first part, this paper presents a study of the impact of the leaks distribution on the measurement result, depending on the main material of the buildings, the ventilation system and the insulation. In a second part, this papers proposes an evaluation of the impact of the season of measurement on the measured airtightness for several French regions with different climates, for wood constructions, concrete construction and brick construction. The last part of this paper presents a first analysis of the correlation between the n value and the uncertainties of the measurement result for single-family houses built according to the RT2012.
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