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Executive Summary: Evaluation Of The Impact Of Vacant Home Space Conditioning Strategies On Summer Relative Humidity, Energy, And Peak Load; Phase Ii, Florida Solar Energy Center, James Cummings

FSEC Energy Research Center®

The Vacant Home Space Conditioning Study was sponsored by Florida Power & Light (FPL) as part of its Conservation R&D Program and carried out by the Florida Solar Energy Center (FSEC). In the US, about one in four retiree "snowbirds" make Florida their destination to escape the northern cold. Snowbird residents number more than 900,000 in Florida during the winter. In some counties of FPL's territory these seasonal residents compose up to 15% of the population (Shih, 1981). This pattern of seasonal occupancy creates a need for space conditioning guidelines for vacant homes to avoid mold problems while minimizing both …

Cooling Performance Assessment Of Building America Homes, Florida Solar Energy Center, David Chasar

FSEC Energy Research Center®

Long-term monitoring of building energy use and environmental conditions has been a strong component of FSEC research since the 1980s. Fully-automated data collection, verification, archiving and management ensure accurate logging of large amounts of data simultaneously from numerous field sites prior to being made available for analysis and display via the internet. Homes are typically monitored using 15 to 50 channels of data to measure indoor and outdoor environmental conditions and energy use of heating, cooling, water heating, whole house, and other points (e.g. Solar PV or Solar DHW) if needed.

Energy performance in many Building America homes has been …