Towards sustainable energy consumption for occupants of buildings with collective heating systems

Abstract

Global warming is forcing us all to reduce our fossil energy consumption. A quantitative survey of people using collective heating in France was conducted to determine whether collective heating hinders energy savings and limits their thermal comfort. The study shows that the existing environment (e.g., heating control devices, access to heating bills) is not suitable for the occupants. Furthermore, the results point out that behaviour is not considered, by occupants, as one of the main energy saving vectors. This is partly due to heating control devices that can be inconvenient to use and thus do not maximize their thermal comfort. Indeed, there is a large difference between the temperature residents want, and the one they get. Our study population reported that rooms are colder than people wish. To achieve sustainable energy savings, efforts should be made to better take into account their comfort while making the technical system more suitable to the occupants, for example, by improving access to and understanding of bills and replacing the current manual control valves with programmable and remotely controllable ones.