Case
Air pollution
Buildings
Energy efficiency in buildings
+3
For more than 80 years, the VELUX Group has created better indoor environments by bringing daylight and fresh air into homes and other buildings all over the world. The VELUX Group was founded in Denmark and is today an international company with a presence in 37 countries.
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For the next year the Pastour family will stay in the Maison Air et Lumière house testing how well the designs perform in terms of both energy and living comfort so that the projections of the house can be compared with the real-life experiment.
Fabrice (35), Samantha (33) and their two children, Rayan (7) and Ismaël (3), will move into Maison Air et Lumière at the end of August to test its comfort. Fabrice is a bus driver with the Paris public transport system (RATP) and Samantha is the head of a business specialising in e-commerce. Both are mad about new technology.
The couple, who rent an apartment in the Paris area, are on a mission to build a modular, light and low-energy house. Testing the Maison Air et Lumière is the ideal opportunity for them to compare the options and flesh out their project.
“The living quality in a house means a lot to us. Air quality is particularly important because of the allergies our family has (to dust, mould, ozone), and one of our sons is asthmatic. We would like a light-filled house to ‘keep our spirits’ up, even in winter. Having an ecological and self-sufficient house is an absolute must for us,” emphasises the family.
Studies by CREDOC in France have shown that what families really want in the home is comfortable living and that the best way of encouraging the general public to save energy is by simplifying access to good practice rather than providing financial incentives. The project’s mission is to define, as precisely as possible and in the context of an experiment, the ideal living conditions for the occupants of a low-energy house in all seasons.
The Maison Air et Lumière is part of the VELUX Model Home 2020 project, consisting of six experimental demo-houses.
Michel Langrand, Managing Director at VELUX France comments:
“Building energy-positive homes – the challenge set by the new French regulations on thermal insulation (RT 2020) – is becoming a reality. The next challenge we face is defining what comfortable living in these houses actually means. With this real-life experiment we want to play our part in helping define the home of the future.”
The experiment consists of making a comparison, over the period of a year, between the targets set when the house was built and what a family consumes and experiences. Any differences from the forecast energy performance and living comfort will then be analysed. The experiment’s results will be shared with building professionals and made available to scientific and political groups so that they can understand consumer expectations and prac-tices when drafting energy policy.
About Model Home 2020
Model Home 2020 is a project launched by the VELUX Group as part of our strategy to take an active part in developing sustainable buildings for the future. It is our vision of how future buildings can be both climate-neutral and comfortable and attractive places to live in through daylight and fresh air.
