Comparison of whole house heat loss test methods under controlled conditions in six distinct retrofit scenarios

Abstract

The accurate assessment of buildings to assess their performance across a range of parameters is an essential part of understanding both new and retrofit buildings. The growing understanding of the performance gap in terms of its assessment and characterisation relies on effective methods of analysis. Here, we evaluate an experimental whole house method, known as QUB. As with many whole building approaches the method establishes heat loss through transmission and ventilation losses. This study compares QUB against an alternative, established, whole house test known as coheating. It was applied in a whole house test facility under controlled conditions. The test property, a solid wall pre-1919 UK archetype, was retrofit using a set of commercially available products and then the retrofit was removed in stages. At each of these stages a QUB test, which commonly takes one night, and coheating test, which can take few weeks, were applied. The objective of the study was to provide a comparison between the new method and more established method in terms of accuracy. The two methods showed close agreement in terms of results, suggesting that the quicker test has great potential as a more practical and economic test. There were higher levels of uncertainty with the QUB method due to shorter measurement periods. The lack of full boundary conditions within the test facility should be considered a limitation in applying the findings directly to the field. However, this study indicates the potential for QUB in validating performance, warranting further investigation.

Design of experiments for Quick U-building method for building energy performance measurement

“…• on a house constructed inside an environmentally controlled chamber at University of Salford (Meulemans, Alzetto, Farmer, & Gorse, 2017;Alzetto, Pandraud, Fitton, & Heusler, 2018;Alzetto, Farmer, Fitton, Huges, & Swan, 2018); • on one of the twin houses of Fraunhofer Institute for Building Physics (Alzetto, Pandraud, Fitton, & Heusler, 2018); • on a house of 280 m 2 in southern France (Mangematin, Pandraud, & Roux, 2012); • on an apartment in a high-raise building in Stockholm (Meulemans J. , 2018).…”

QUB/e: A Novel Transient Experimental Method for in situ Measurements of the Thermal Performance of Building Fabrics

“…A guard house is also present so that the effects of a neighbouring property can be explored during experiments. For more details, the interested reader should refer to Ji et al (2014), Farmer et al (2015) and Alzetto et al (2016b).…”

“…A modified version of Leeds Beckett University's 2013 Whole House Heat Loss Test Method (Johnston et al, 2013) was used to obtain measurements of the test house HLC during each steadystate measurement period Alzetto et al, 2016b).…”

“…Whole building thermal performance (heat loss coefficient, HLC): to improve the accuracy and reduce the duration of QUB tests (Mangematin et al, 2012;Pandraud and Fitton, 2013;Pandraud et al, 2014;Alzetto et al, 2014;Bouchié et al, 2014;Alzetto et al, 2016a;Alzetto et al, 2016b); 2. Local elements thermal performance (U-values): to validate the QUB/e method (Meulemans and Alzetto, 2016) vs. steady-state measurements (i.e., in accordance with ISO 9869-1).…”

Sensitivity of Characterizing the Heat Loss Coefficient through On-Board Monitoring: A Case Study Analysis

“…By applying statistical data analysis methods, they infer an estimate of the HLC, a procedure known as parameter or system identification [17,18]. Although these on-site characterization techniques yield promising results [19,20], there are some practical constraints related to the dedicated experiments that prevent a large-scale rollout. For example, the building cannot be accessed during the measurements, which take about 2 to 3 days to complete for the QUB and PSTAR test.…”