Proposal of a new approach for avoiding Anti-Insulation in residential buildings by considering occupant’s comfort condition

Abstract

Anti-Insulation is a phenomenon whereby a building’s cooling energy increases following the thermal insulation of the envelope. Therefore, this ever-growing phenomenon could inflict a new problem in the building industry. However, this issue has been overlooked and less discussed in practical projects and academic circles. Thus, the paper investigates the reasons that lead to Anti-Insulation concealment in the buildings and answer to this question that why this vital phenomenon is ignored. Then, for preventing Anti-Insulation occurrence in the buildings and simultaneously, meeting the comfort condition, the determination of the proper setpoint temperature as a practical solution is conducted. For this purpose, the thermal performance of the external and internal insulation of a building is evaluated by the simulation in the Energy Plus, dynamic thermal simulation software. The building is located in a cold climate, and four insulators including Polystyrene, Polyurethane, Glass-wool, and Rockwool are used for insulation of this building. Results indicate that the main reason for Anti-Insulation concealment is a simplification in the internal heating loads calculation. Besides, using total energy consumption in the building simulation instead of assessing cooling and heating energy separately aggravates this phenomenon concealment. Based on results, whereas internal insulation outperforms external insulation in the heating energy-saving, external insulation offers a relatively more cooling energy reduction. Polyurethane insulator, Polystyrene, Rockwool, and Glass-wool have the highest heating and total energy conservation, respectively. This order is vice versa in the case of cooling energy.