Building America Case Study: Southern Energy Homes, First DOE Zero Energy Ready Manufactured Home, Russellville, Alabama

Three side-by-side lab houses were built, instrumented and monitored in an effort to determine through field testing and analysis the relative contributions of select technologies toward reducing energy use in new manufactured homes.The lab houses in Russellville, Alabama compared the performance of three homes built to varying levels of thermal integrity and HVAC equipment: a baseline HUD-code home equipped with an electric furnace and a split system air conditioner; an ENERGY STAR manufactured home with an enhanced thermal envelope and traditional split system heat pump; and a house designed to qualify for Zero Energy Ready Home designation with a ductless mini-split heat pump with transfer fan distribution system in place of the traditional duct system for distribution. Experiments were conducted in the lab houses to evaluate impact on energy and comfort of interior door position, window blind position and transfer fan operation. The report describes results of tracer gas and co-heating tests and presents calculation of the heat pump coefficient of performance for both the traditional heat pump and the ductless mini-split. A series of calibrated energy models was developed based on measured data and run in three locations in the Southeast to compare annual energy usage of the three homes.