A Collection of Homes to Represent the U.S. Housing Stock

Published

August 1, 2008

Author(s)

Andrew K. Persily, Amy Musser, Dennis D. Leber

Abstract

In order to allow nationwide analysis of ventilation and indoor air quality issues in residential buildings, a set 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). The RECS dataset includes about 6000 U.S. residences and the AHS covers about 60,000, and are both conducted periodically to characterize the U.S. housing stock. Based on these datasets, just over 200 dwellings were defined that represent 80 % of the U.S. housing stock. These buildings are grouped into four categories: detached, attached, manufactured homes and apartment buildings. This paper describes the RECS and AHS datasets and how they were used to define this suite of homes. Among the key characteristics addressed in defining these homes are age, floor area, number of floors, foundation type and presence of a garage. In addition, this report describes multizone representations of the dwellings that were created in the airflow model CONTAM and are now available for analyzes of residential ventilation, energy and indoor air quality issues. The report also documents the sources of data and the decisions made in developing the models, describes each model, and summarizes the results of model testing.

Citation

NIST Interagency/Internal Report (NISTIR) - 7330

Report Number

7330

NIST Pub Series

NIST Interagency/Internal Report (NISTIR)

Pub Type

NIST Pubs

Keywords

database, housing, modeling, residential buildings, ventilation

Citation

Persily, A. , Musser, A. and Leber, D. (2008), A Collection of Homes to Represent the U.S. Housing Stock, NIST Interagency/Internal Report (NISTIR), National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, MD (Accessed April 16, 2024)