Case 11 - A Collection of Homes Representing U.S. Housing Stock

A Collection of Homes Representing U.S. Housing Stock

[Persily A.K., Musser A., Leber D. (2006)]

In order to allow nationwide or regional analyses of ventilation and indoor air quality issues in residential buildings, a collection or "suite" of homes has been defined to represent the housing stock of the United States. This collection of dwellings is based on two residential housing surveys, the U.S. Department of Energy Residential Energy Consumptions Survey (RECS) and the U.S. Census Bureau American Housing Survey (AHS), both of which are conducted periodically to characterize the U.S. housing stock. The RECS dataset includes about 6000 U.S. residences, and the AHS covers about 60,000. Based on these datasets, just over 200 dwellings were defined that together represent 80 % of the U.S. housing stock. These dwellings are grouped into four categories: detached, attached, manufactured homes and apartments. The report, NISTIR 7330, describes the RECS and AHS datasets and how they were used to define this collection. Among the key characteristics addressed in defining these dwellings are age, floor area, number of floors, foundation type and existence of a garage. In addition, multizone representations of the dwellings that were created in the airflow model CONTAM that are available at the link below, along with pdf files of floorplans.

CONTAM Projects [ZIP 1.96Mbs]      Floor Plans [ZIP 1.24Mbs]