Abstract
Most existing residential buildings adopt one single-zone thermostat to control the heating of rooms with different thermal conditions. This solution often provides poor thermal comfort and inefficient use of energy. The current market proposes smart thermostats and thermostatic radiator valves (TRVs) as cheap and relatively easy-to-install retrofit solutions. These systems provide increased freedom of installation, due to the use of wireless communication; however, the uncertainty of the measured air temperature, considering the thermostat placement, could impact the final heating performance. This paper presents a sensing optimization approach for a home thermostat, in order to determine the optimal retrofit configuration to reduce the sensing uncertainty, thus achieving the required comfort level and minimizing the retrofit’s payback period. The methodology was applied to a real case study—a dwelling located in Italy. The measured data and a simulation model were used to create different retrofit scenarios. Among these, the optimal scenario was achieved through thermostat repositioning and a setpoint of 21 °C, without the use of TRVs. Such optimization provided an improvement of control performance due to sensor location, with consequent energy savings of 7% (compared to the baseline). The resulting payback period ranged from two and a half years to less than a year, depending on impact of the embedded smart thermostat algorithms.
Highlights
According to [1], the stock of residential buildings in the EU is relatively old, with more than 40% having been built before 1960 and 90% before 1990
This study proposes a methodology based on dynamic building simulation, in order to optimize the retrofitting of an existing heating control system for residential buildings, taking into account the optimal location for measuring the air temperature to reduce control errors due to uncertainty
Ness of the smart thermostat could decrease the payback period from four to two and a half years for the what‐if scenario All‐in, which was aligned with the values reported in
Summary
According to [1], the stock of residential buildings in the EU is relatively old, with more than 40% having been built before 1960 and 90% before 1990. Older buildings typically use more energy than new ones. The rate at which new buildings either replace this old stock, or expand the total stock, is low (about 1% a year). This implies that the reduction of energy consumption of buildings should not exclude the renovation of existing buildings. The renovation rate is low, with only about 1–2% of the building stock being renovated each year [2]. The residential building stock is subject to a long renovation cycle, according to [3]
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