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Different User Behavior’s Impact on Simulated Heating Demand in Energy Efficient Buildings

Authors:
Hans Bagge
Dennis Johansson

Keywords: space heating; household electricity; domestic hot water; user behavior.

Abstract:
To design a building that fulfills requirements regarding low energy use, it is crucial to perform energy simulations of the building in question during the design process and the simulations must be representative of the building during operation. All countries within the European Union will require new buildings to be nearly zero energy buildings beginning in 2019. In nearly zero energy buildings and passive houses, the user related energy uses, household electricity and domestic hot water heating, make up about 80 % of the total energy use since the use of space heating is low. The building's heating demand is affected by the occupants’ use of domestic hot water and household electricity. Increased use of domestic hot water increases the heating demand, while a high use of household electricity can reduce the heating demand. Different user characteristics will result in different heating demand in the same building, and in low energy buildings, different user characteristics will have a relatively higher impact compared to less energy efficient buildings. There is a lack of studies that analyze resulting energy use of dwellings based on distribution of measured user related input data. The aim of this paper was to annually measure household electricity and domestic hot water volume in 562 apartments, present the measured distributions and analyze the influence on the apartment heating demand of energy efficient buildings and typical buildings by use of simulations of the building physics and the building services. The results show that, in order to predict the energy use of energy efficient residential buildings, with a reasonable accuracy, the different users’ characteristics regarding household electricity and domestic hot water must be taken into account. Furthermore, to determine the impact that different users will have on a building's heating demand, the analysis must be based on the actual building and the result should be given as a distribution rather than as a single figure.

Pages: 120 to 125

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2014

Publication date: October 12, 2014

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2308-4537

ISBN: 978-1-61208-371-1

Location: Nice, France

Dates: from October 12, 2014 to October 16, 2014