The Effect of Occupants’ Behaviour on the Building Performance Gap: UK Residential Case Studies

Ali Bahadori-Jahromi,Hexin Zhang,Radwa Salem,Anastasia Mylona,Agha Usama Hasan

doi:10.3390/su14031362

Abstract

Studies have shown that the assumptions used to create dynamic thermal models of buildings do not reflect their actual energy use. Bridging the energy performance gap is vital in ensuring that a designed or retrofitted building meets the energy performance targets. Using thermal analysis simulation software TAS, this paper presents a simulation model of seven different UK single family houses. The results from the various models are validated by comparing the actual energy demand against the simulated consumption. The simulation results show that the heating set point has the greatest impact on the simulated energy demand. The results also demonstrate that the energy demand of the dwellings can be reduced by applying window opening schemes and by controlling the heating setpoint temperature and schedule. Plug load consumption is also considered by using plug load data of real UK households, as obtained from a longitudinal study, and calibrating the model based on average plug load contributions for the households. The results showed that, by increasing the heating set point and window opening schedules by 10% from self-reported data, and by considering an additional 12% for plug loads, the energy performance gap is reduced to less than >15% for all examined houses.

Highlights

Building modelling is an essential part of building design
In terms of the percentage difference between actual and modelled energy demand, all the houses had a difference within the range of 27% to 32%. This corroborates the idea within the literature that there may be common factors which lead to this performance gap between actual and simulated energy demand
Bridging the energy performance gap is vital in ensuring that a designed or retrofitted building meets the energy performance targets that are set at the beginning of the project

Summary

Introduction

Building modelling is an essential part of building design. This is because of the increase in standards of buildings regulations [1]. Studies have shown that the assumptions used to create dynamic thermal models of buildings do not reflect their actual energy use [5,6,7,8,9]. This is known as the performance gap. It has been found that the energy performance of the actual building is higher than the energy performance of the modelled building, even when the modelled building is a reproduction of the building [10,11,12,13,14]

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Discussion

Conclusion