How is the weather in your kitchen today? And what was the weather like in your bedroom last night? If your home or office has plenty of cracks and openings then the weather outside will intrude in, but if it is super-insulated the weather will stay firmly outside.
Keeping the weather out saves energy, but a lack of fresh air is bad for our health. Studies have shown that increasing ventilation reduces carbon dioxide and pollutant concentrations and makes us think faster, dramatically improving school and workplace performance. But the amount of fresh air coming into a building varies immensely, and depends upon the weather and the way in which the surrounding buildings influence the local airflow.
Janet Barlow and colleagues from Reading University have been investigating these effects, by building a mini-city using stacks of hay bales to represent buildings in a field in Bedfordshire. Amongst the hay bale city is a test building, where measurements of pressure, wind flow and temperature are monitored. “We vary the test building ventilation in two ways; the layout of windows on the cube and whether the cube is surrounded by other cubes,” explains Barlow, who is a principal investigator on the Refresh Project.
Right now Barlow and her team are watching how the wind whistles around the corners of their hay bale cubes, and gathering data on how the weather and building layout affects ventilation indoors. Ultimately they hope that their experiments will lead to better control of indoor weather and a healthier environment for all of us.
