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Private houses: towards energy efficiency with ODMIR 4

The objective of the ODMIR4 project, prizewinner of the Building Energy Foundation, is to produce a decision-making assistance tool for retrofitting of private houses.  The consortium brings together PHENIX Evolution, a subsidiary of GEOXIA, the French private house builder, the ARMINES (Mines de Paris) research organisations, EDF R&D, and CSTB.  PHENIX Evolution does about 4 000 retrofitting operations per year among more than 200 000 private houses in France.

The end purpose of this project is to offer owners of private houses solutions for energy retrofitting on the most important items such as insulation, heating, ventilation, etc., using a pedagogic and didactic tool.  These solutions are broken down in the form of adapted and consistent energy packs produced by experts in the research organisations concerned.

Experimental operation in Saint-Fargeau: energy retrofitting, enlargement works by increases in height.

These packs include conventional and innovative solutions used to overcome identified weaknesses in houses and to work towards a particularly significant reduction in energy consumption.  Finally, the owner is given key information in the decision-making process, for example about the expected gain in terms of energy consumption and the return on investment time.

CSTB provides its expertise at all steps of the project.  In particular, it contributes to integration of innovative solutions dedicated to ventilation and regulation, and to the development of an energy performance calculation core.  It also provides know-how for the production of an attractive and user-friendly interface capable of efficiently providing all elements necessary to help with the decision, that owners can use to implement an energy retrofitting.

Finally, the entire approach is being tested in the field in Saint-Fargeau-Ponthierry in the Seine & Marne Department, where an energy retrofitting operation is currently being made on a Phenix house and the expected reduction in the energy bill is a factor of 4.

The Energy Building Foundation

The Energy Building Foundation was created by Arcelor, EDF, Gaz de France and Lafarge.  The ADEME is the organiser and the Ministries of the Interior, Housing, Research and Industry are supporting it.  It was set up to finance research programmes on low consumption buildings.  Different calls for projects were initiated between 2005 and 2007.

Internet site: http://www.batiment-energie.org/