Energy performance of multifamily buildings : building characteristic and user influence

Abstract: Today many professional property holders use different types of software for monthly energy analyses. The data is however often limited to energy and water use, that is paid for by the property holder. In year 2001, financed by the Swedish Energy Agency, the first steps were taken to create a national web based data base, eNyckeln. A property holder may then enter consumption data together with about 50 other building specific parameters to this data base in order to enable benchmarking and energy performance evaluations. Due to EU-regulations and the increasing awareness of energy and environmental issues there is a large interest in evaluating the energy performance and also to identify effective energy retrofits. The used energy performance indicator is still only the annual energy use for heating per square meter of area to let, kWh/m2,year, despite the fact that monthly data often are available. The main problem with this indicator, which is the stipulated measure, is that it reflects a lot of user influence and that only a part of the total energy use is considered. The main focus of this thesis is to explore the possibilities, based on the national data base, to extract additional energy information about multi family buildings (MFB) using monthly data in combination with different assumed consumption pattern but also to identify potential for energy savings. For the latter a multivariate method was used to identify relations between the energy use and building specific parameters. The analysis gave clear indications that the available area, the area to let, is not appropriate for normalization purposes since the remaining heated area can be significant. Due to this fact, the analysis was mainly limited to qualitative conclusions. As measure of the buildings energy characteristic, the total heat loss coefficient, Ktot,(W/ºK) is determined and the robustness for the estimate of Ktot to different assumptions of user behaviour is investigated. The result shows that the value of Ktot is fairly insensitive to different indoor temperature, use of domestic hot water and household electricity. With the addition of m2 it can of course be used for benchmarking. Using the mentioned measure of the buildings energy characteristic for validating the energy performance has a clear advantage compared to the traditional kWh/m2, since the user behaviour is of minor importance. As a result of this an improved analysis of the energy performance will be obtained. A guarantee for new buildings energy performance based on this method is therefore a challenge for the building sector to develop.