Extending the Air and Moisture Leakage Calculator to add Residential Buildings and Additional Commercial Buildings

The DOE Windows and Building Envelope Research and Development Roadmap for Emerging Technologies shows that in 2010, infiltration was responsible for 4 quads of space conditioning primary energy use in the residential and commercial sectors. The relative contribution of air leakage in building heating and cooling load is increasing with improvement in the thermal resistance of building envelopes. Advanced air barrier technologies and construction practices have been developed to reduce air leakage in buildings. However, limited information on the impact of air barrier technologies on energy consumption and the durability of buildings has hindered their adoption. In the past Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), Air Barrier Association of America (ABBA), and U.S.-China Clean Energy Research Center for Building Energy Efficiency (CERC-BEE) collaborated to develop an online calculator that estimates the potential energy and cost savings in major U.S., Canadian and Chinese cities from improvement in air tightness in commercial buildings. In 2018–2019, the calculator was expanded to add moisture transfer calculations given that air leakage through the building envelope can have a significant impact on moisture transfer and associated impacts. In this study, the calculator is expanded further by adding data for two additional commercial buildings (strip mall and primary school) and a residential building. The team investigated the impact of airtightness on energy consumption and moisture transfer of the added buildings. The study includes the analysis of air tightness in 52 major cities in the U.S. and 5 cities in Canada.