Reimagining HVAC for New Manufactured Housing

Overview

Manufactured housing represents one of the most affordable paths to home ownership for American households. The heating, ventilating, and air-conditioning (HVAC) systems installed in manufactured housing are often low-cost systems that are expensive to operate due to leakage-prone ductwork. This Slipstream project facilitates feasibility assessments and conducts proof-of-concept and field testing of various HVAC-related innovations to improve the performance of manufactured homes and increase heat pump adoption, thereby improving energy performance well beyond that mandated by current HUD codes.

Project Goals

The goal of this project is to increase the adoption of advanced HVAC technology in the manufactured housing industry, resulting in improved energy efficiency, durability, and indoor air quality without significant production cost increases. The project identifies the most promising innovations based on market drivers, energy impact, and cost-effectiveness, demonstrating these HVAC innovations through proof-of-concept testing to further show feasibility in manufactured homes.

Impacts

The innovative approaches examined within this project have the following impacts: (1) duct- and air-leakage testing enable field technicians to identify and resolve HVAC and building shell issues before occupation, reducing energy use for occupants, and (2) partial installation of heat pumps in the factory enables proper sizing and adoption of efficient space-conditioning technology. Shipping homes from the factory with tighter building envelopes and ducts prepared for heat pump installation is a tremendous opportunity for improving the energy performance of manufactured homes.

Technology Impact

Obtaining consistently tight ducts that maintain their tightness over time—or eliminating the need for ductwork entirely—would enable significant energy savings and improved occupant comfort in manufactured housing. Further, modern inverter-driven air-source heat pumps are significantly more efficient than older heat pump technology and vastly more so than the electric-resistance heating systems that ship with many manufactured homes. They are also capable of operating under much colder conditions than previous generations of heat pumps.

Market Impact

Improved airtightness and heat pump deployment in manufactured housing could potentially result in a 57% reduction in space-conditioning primary energy, or 10.3 Tbtu of aggregate savings for the estimated 800,000 manufactured homes that will be produced between 2023 and 2030.