Improving the Energy Performance Certificate recommendations’ accuracy for residential building through simple measurements of key inputs

Abstract

The Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) allows building users to be informed and aware of the quality of the buildings in terms of energy needs. Additionally, the EPC includes a future for existing buildings, which is the incorporation of a Recommendation list of Measures (RLMs) to improve their energy performance in a cost-effective way. Which have risen the question if this tool can provide trustful Cost-effective recommendations due despite the uses of standardized inputs. This study focuses on estimating the impact of using measure ventilation rate, heating set point and airtightness on the profitability of the recommendations. The study is based on common dwelling in Norway, comparing results obtained with a Building Performance Simulation Software, following the Norwegian standard for energy certification and with the uses of measured ventilation rate, airtightness and real heating set points. The results show that the performance gap can be reduced significantly just by adopting these inputs, increasing the confidence on the RLMs and reducing the uncertainty of the investment.

A Comparative Study on Discrepancies in Residential Building Energy Performance Certification in a Mediterranean Context

“…EPC serves as a valuable global tool, providing engineers and consumers with insights into building energy performance and strategies for cost-effective enhancements [55,72]. A plethora of studies utilizing EPC software tools have concentrated on improving building energy performance through diverse scenarios, comparing and evaluating data derived from EPC [55,67,73,74].…”

Impact of the EPBD on Changes in the Energy Performance of Multi-Apartment Buildings in Lithuania

“…EPCs were initially introduced more than 20 years ago; however, very little research has been conducted to analyse the results and impact of the certification policy on the construction market [7][8][9][10][11][12][13]. There is a lack of a comprehensive overview of the available data in the EPCs used in each country across the EU, and although numerous studies on EPCs have been carried out in Northern and Southern Europe [14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21], detailed analysis of energy consumption by individual building engineering systems in the context of total energy consumption and CO 2 emissions is severely lacking.…”

The Role of Occupants in Buildings’ Energy Performance Gap: Myth or Reality?

“…Additionally, some studies measured the wind speed [15,27,45], wind direction [27,45], solar radiation [15,27,31,37,45,56], precipitation [15], relative humidity [15,45], as well as VOC's [57]. A few studies did not explicitly mention which variables were measured but maintained that there was a weather station on site [12,36,50,52,92].…”

“…Occupants opened windows more frequently or for longer periods (as compared to model assumptions) [5,6,12,14,18,22,28,32,37,45,52,54,55,58,67,72,77,79,82,89,95] Occupants turned off the installed MVHR (mechanical ventilation with heat recovery) and used windows instead for ventilation [6,14,49] Discrepancies between assumed and actual operation of shading devices resulting in the deviation of actual solar gains from model assumptions [5,21,22,89] Mechanical systems Set-point temperature, thermostat settings, system operating schedules and settings Higher actual indoor temperatures than those assumed in the model [6,9,11,14,15,18,29,37,53,55,58,75,79,82,90,101,104,107,…”