West Village Community: Quality Management Processes and Preliminary Heat Pump Water Heater Performance

West Village, a multi-use project underway at the University of California Davis, represents a ground-breaking sustainable community incorporating energy efficiency measures and on-site renewable generation to achieve community-level Zero Net Energy (ZNE) goals. The project when complete will provide housing for students, faculty, and staff with a vision to minimize the community's impact onenergy use by reducing building energy use, providing on-site generation, and encouraging alternative forms of transportation. This focus of this research is on the 192 student apartments that were completed in 2011 under Phase I of the West Village multi-year project. The numerous aggressive energy efficiency measures implemented result in estimated source energy savings of 37% over the B10Benchmark. There are two primary objectives of this research. The first is to evaluate performance and efficiency of the central heat pump water heaters as a strategy to provide efficient electric water heating for net-zero all-electric buildings and where natural gas is not available on site. In addition, effectiveness of the quality assurance and quality control processes implemented to ensureproper system commissioning and to meet program participation requirements is evaluated. Recommendations for improvements that could improve successful implementation for large-scale, high performance communities are identified.