Implementing User Behaviour on Dynamic Building Simulations for Energy Consumption

Abstract

User behaviour influences the energy consumption of domestic properties with different range of variations and this has an effect on the results of building simulations based on default or general values, as opposed to implementing user behaviour. The aim of this paper is to evaluate and quantify the effect of implementing user behaviour in building dynamic simulation to calculate heating and domestic how water energy consumption to reduce the performance gap. The results for space heating and domestic hot water from dynamic building simulations will be compare to actual energy bills for a general building simulation technique and a calibrated building simulation, incorporating user behaviour details. By using user behaviour details to create calibrated building simulations, a correlation to actual energy bills of over 90% can be achieved for a dataset of 22 properties. This study has shown that by incorporating user behaviour into building simulations, a more accurate estimation of energy consumption can be achieved. More importantly, the methodology approach allows the user behaviour parameters to be collected by means of a questionnaire, providing an easy and low budget approach to incorporate user behaviour into dynamic building simulations to reduce the performance.