TightVent Europe

TightVent Europe is a platform, formed in January 2011, with a focus on building and ductwork airtightness issues. The creation of the platform was triggered by the need for a strong and concerted initiative to meet the Directive on the energy performance of buildings recast’s ambitious targets for the year 2020 and overcome the challenges in relation to the envelope and ductwork leakage towards the generalization of nearly zero-energy buildings. The platform’s main activities, among others, include the production and dissemination of policy oriented publications, networking among local or national airtightness associations, as well as the organization of conferences, workshops and webinars.

TightVent Europe was launched and initiated in January 2011 by INIVE EEIG (International Network for Information on Ventilation and Energy Performance), a registered European Economic Interest Grouping (EEIG) whose members include building research centres in Europe. Since then, the platform has received the financial and/or technical support from its partners: Buildings Performance Institute Europe, BlowerDoor GmbH, Eurima, Lindab, Retrotec, Soudal, Wienerberger and Industrias Gonal.

The target audience of the TightVent Europe activities ranges from the research community over designers, practitioners, supply industry to European, national and regional government policy makers. It includes policy makers, training centres, designers, engineers and builders, air leakage testers, local and national airtightness associations, research and technical centres.

In September 2012, TightVent Europe launched the TightVent Airtightness Associations Committee (TightVent TAAC committee) with the primary goal to promote reliable testing and reporting procedures. At present, the participants are from Belgium, Canada, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, France, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Latvia, Norway, Poland, Sweden, UK and the US. The scope of this committees includes various aspects such as:

Since 2011, TightVent Europe has published 6 reports in the fields of building and ductwork airtightness. The first publication on the challenges for building and ductwork airtightness was released in 2011 entitled as: “Critical steps for a wide scale implementation of building and ductwork airtightness”. It included an introductory paper browsing the issues of concern and collect a series of technical documents, namely those produced within the ASIEPI project as well as within the SAVE-DUCT and AIRWAYS projects. Another publication: “Methods and techniques for airtight buildings” was released in 2012, with an overview to the design principles and construction methods for building airtightness. Moreover, the publication: "Building air leakage databases in energy conservation policies: Analysis of selected initiatives in 4 European countries and the USA" was also released in 2012 with information on existing envelope air leakage databases from five countries: Czech Republic, France, Germany, UK and USA. Furthermore,another report was produced in close collaboration with the AIVC, "Building airtightness: a critical review of testing reporting and quality schemes in 10 countries", in 2012; a review of testing and reporting about building airtightness and quality management issues for achieving a good airtightness in 10 countries.In 2013, TightVent Europe published "Building and ductwork airtightness: Selected papers from the REHVA special journal issue on ‘airtightness’" composed of relevant contributions from the special issue on airtightness of the REHVA journal.

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