Monitoring of the Building Envelope of a Heritage House - A Case Study

The paper describes the long-term monitoring of the hygrothermal performance of the building envelope of a heritage house located in Ottawa. The house, once the residence of two of Canada's Prime Ministers, now serves as a museum. To preserve the historical artifacts within the building, the specified temperature and relative humidity for the indoor air are 21C and 35% to 50% respectively. As the house must also be preserved, there was concern about the effect of the high indoor relative humidity (moisture) on the durability of the building structure. The main objective of the monitoring was to assess the effect of the conditioned air on the building envelope