A pilot study of radon levels in certified passive house buildings
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The international Passive House Standard delivers high thermal comfort based on the principles of excellent building fabric and balanced mechanical heat recovery ventilation. Considering that the typical person in industrial countries (such as the UK) spends ∼90% of their time indoors, there are surprisingly few academic studies on air quality in the home. Indoor air quality and the prevalence of overheating are attracting an increasing amount of research attention across Europe, but post occupancy monitoring of indoor radon concentrations is severely underrepresented, especially in Ireland and the UK. Radon is a naturally occurring radioactive gas and known carcinogen that presents a potential risk to occupier health. This pilot study investigates measured radon levels in certified Passive House buildings in Northern Ireland and presents an overview of technical radon prevention design options for new builds and mitigation measures for existing buildings. Initial findings indicate that buildings built to the Passive House Standard correspond with reduced indoor radon gas concentrations. Practical application: This Technical Note addresses an issue pertinent to the industry at this time. The growth of energy-efficient standards (such as Passive House) and common principles (such as increased airtightness levels and mechanical ventilation systems) has accelerated the need for research data on indoor radon concentrations. This research bridges the knowledge gap between the fields of indoor air quality (specifically radon), health, sustainability and the built environment.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".