Abstract
The existing performance gap between the design and the real energy consumption of a building could have three main origins: the occupants’ behaviour, the performance of the energy systems and the performance of the building envelope. Through the estimation of the in-use Heat Loss Coefficient (HLC), it is possible to characterise the building’s envelope energy performance under occupied conditions. In this research, the estimation of the HLC of two individual residential buildings located in Gainsborough and Loughborough (UK) was carried out using an average method. This average method was developed and successfully tested in previous research for an occupied four-story office building with very different characteristics to individual residential buildings. Furthermore, one of the analysed residential buildings is a new, well-insulated building, while the other represents the old, poorly insulated semidetached residential building typology. Thus, the monitored data provided were filtered in order to apply the abovementioned average method. Even without fulfilling all the average method requirements for these two residential buildings, the method provides reliable HLC values for both residential buildings. For the house in Gainsborough, the best estimated HLC value was 60.2 W/K, while the best approach for Loughborough was 366.6 W/K. Thus, despite the uncertainty sources found during the analysis, the method seems promising for its application to residential buildings.
Highlights
The majority of buildings constructed in the European Union in the past were built without considering any thermal regulations, since energy efficiency was not considered a major issue until the 1970s [1]
It was necessary to ease some of the method requirements, taking more flexible limitations for the solar gains 10% weight requirement, and this relaxation effect on the Heat Loss Coefficient (HLC) estimation was analysed
The analysis shows some variation between the individual HLC estimates of both buildings
Summary
The majority of buildings constructed in the European Union in the past were built without considering any thermal regulations, since energy efficiency was not considered a major issue until the 1970s [1]. It is well known that buildings in the EU are responsible for a considerable percentage of the energy consumption and CO2 emissions in accordance with H2020 Energy Efficient Buildings. Achieving an energy efficient building is not a simple task. Several buildings designed to obtain a considerable reduction in energy consumption have failed during this process. This is because there is still an important difference between the real performance and the theoretical performance given by the designers [3]. A considerable number of studies have shown that the real energy consumption can be up to two to five times higher than the predicted energy consumption [4,5]
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