Commissioning and Benchmarking

Commissioning the houses took place from January to May 1999. During this period, the houses were finalized, debugged and commissioned. The key objective of the commissioning exercise was to ensure that all of the operating characteristics of the houses were understood and characterized for all operating conditions. As a result, when performing experiments involving other technologies, all resulting differences in house performance could be confidently attributed to performance of the technology and not to some undocumented anomaly in facility performance.

The objective of benchmarking was to account for any remaining post-commissioning differences between the houses, and record these statistically, to give a point of reference for any future technology assessments. The first benchmarking of the houses occurred over the period from November 1999 to the end of January 2000. Subsequent benchmarking has been performed every heating and cooling season to ensure proper house operation, and to establish the point of reference for new projects.

For information regarding the commissioning of the research houses, please refer to the following documents:

Papers

Commissioning twin houses for assessing the performance of energy conserving technologies
Swinton, M.C. Moussa, H. Marchand, R.G.
Performance of Exterior Envelopes of Whole Buildings VIII Integration of Building Envelopes (Clearwater, Florida, 2001-12-02)
pp. 1-10. 2001-12-07
[Full citation / Référence complète]

Benchmarking twin houses and assessment of the energy performance of two gas combo heating systems
Swinton, M.C. Entchev, E. Szadkowski, F. Marchand, R.G.
9th Canadian Conference on Building Science and Technology (Vancouver, B.C., 2003- 02-27)
pp. 365-381. 2003-02-01
[Full citation / Référence complète]