Designed vs. Actual Occupant Behaviour in Buildings – A Historical Perspective.

Energy efficiency and actual energy use in buildings depend on various factors. As building technology, construction quality, climate representation, advanced design tools and other non-human-related aspects are under scientific investigation and development for many decades, energy consumption in buildings started to decrease and reached a certain level. However, the desired net zero or even net positive energy consumption levels are far from reality yet in many cases. It was found that there is an essential component which is still underestimated and little researched: humans. Without understanding and appropriately representing building occupants and their needs in the design process, it seems impossible to estimate real, in-use energy consumption levels. In the 2nd half of the 20th century, occupant needs and behaviour were in the centre of many design cases. For example, prefabricated concrete block apartment buildings that were mass-produced in the Soviet era in Eastern Europe. These residential units were designed to fit the era’s occupants in all aspects. The purpose of the rigorous design process was to make sure that the mass-produced buildings will fit well the families moving in. Somewhat differently, today our goal in occupant-centric design is to improve energy efficiency and to make sure that occupants have a comfortable and easy-to-use space to live or work. However, the results and methods applied by our ancestors should be examined and from many aspects their rigorous occupant-investigations can teach us a lot and can improve our practices today. This paper analyses the process of module-design of the 50-60’s and their resulting apartment and occupant type “templates” using documents of the era and interviews with designers and other participants of that process and highlights the parts that are adaptable to today’s design practices

Az épülethasználók fi gyelembevétele a magyarországi tervezési gyakorlatban

Napjainkban az Európai Uniós energiapolitikai céloknak is köszönhetően egyre nagyobb fi gyelem irányul az épületekhez kapcsolódó energiahatékonyság, valamint a belső környezet kérdéskörére. Az e területeken kitűzött célok elérésében fi gyelmet érdemel egy régi-új kutatási terület: az épülethasználói viselkedés épületenergetikai vizsgálata. Egy nemzetközi projekt keretében szerveződött kutatócsoport a felhasználó-központú tervezés és üzemeltetés jelenlegi gyakorlatainak felmérésére létrehozott egy kérdőívet, amely az építőiparban dolgozó különböző szakágakból érkező (pl. építész, épületgépész, villamosmérnök, épületautomatika) tervezők és szakemberek részére került kidolgozásra. A kérdőív célja az volt, hogy felmérje az épülethasználók fi gyelembevételének mértékét a jelenlegi gyakorlat szerinti tervezési és üzemeltetési folyamat során. Jelen cikkben a magyarországi adatgyűjtés eredményeit ismertetjük. Ez alapján megállapítható, hogy ma itthon a szimulációkkal támogatott felhasználó-centrikus tervezés még gyerekcipőben jár, amelynek oka leginkább a megbízói oldal költségközpontú szemlélete. A kutatásból kirajzolódik, hogy az építészek többet „tudnak” az épület felhasználóiról, mint például egy gépészeti tanácsadó, vagy tervező, de ez a mélyebb tudás nem jár együtt változatosabb szimulációs szoftverek alkalmazásával. A kutatási projekt a 12 másik országban folytatott nemzeti felmérések eredményeinek értékelése után tovább folytatódik. A munka következő lépése a magyarországi adatok összevetése lesz a projektben résztvevő többi ország eredményeivel

Large scale smart meter data assessment for energy benchmarking and occupant behaviour profile development

This paper will present objectives and first results of the research project entitled “Large Scale Smart Meter Data Assessment for Energy Benchmarking and Occupant Behaviour Profile Development of Building Clusters,” implemented in the geographical scope of Hungary. The project seeks to utilize a new and unique opportunity for accessing and processing an enormous dataset collected by smart meters. Recently in Hungary, nearly 10 000 buildings have been equipped with smart meters within the “Central Smart Grid Pilot Project”. By means of advanced data analysis techniques, consumption trends and motivations of building users are being investigated. The aims are to help building designers and engineers design more energy efficient buildings at lower investment costs by avoiding system oversizing, and to obtain better knowledge about hourly, daily and monthly energy consumption trends. Furthermore, standard net demand values for normative energy calculations can be updated and specified more precisely since consumption habits change with time and depend on the region

Development of electricity consumption profiles of residential buildings based on smart meter data clustering

In the present research, a high-resolution, detailed electric load dataset was assessed, collected by smart meters from nearly a thousand households in Hungary, many of them single-family houses. The objective was to evaluate this database in detail to determine energy consumption profiles from time series of daily and annual electric load. After representativity check of dataset daily and annual energy consumption profiles were developed, applying three different clustering methods (k-means, fuzzy k-means, agglomerative hierarchical) and three different cluster validity indexes (elbow method, silhouette method, Dunn index) in MATLAB environment. The best clustering method for our examination proved to be the kmeans clustering technique. Analyses were carried out to identify different consumer groups, as well as to clarify the impact of specific parameters such as meter type in the housing unit (e.g. peak, offpeak meter), day of the week (e.g. weekend, weekday), seasonality, geographical location, settlement type and housing type (single-family house, flat, age class of the building). Furthermore, four electric user profile types were proposed, which can be used for building energy demand simulation, summer heat load and winter heating demand calculatio

Overview and future challenges of nearly zero-energy building (nZEB) design in Eastern Europe

The European Unions’ ambition for the construction sector is to be carbon neutral by 2030 for new construction. Since 2021, all new buildings in the EU should have been constructed as nearly zero-energy buildings (nZEB). However, Eastern European countries struggle to implement the 2018 Energy Performance of Building Directive recast requirements. Next to the economic challenges, equally essential factors hinder renovating the existing residential building stock and adding newly constructed highperformance buildings sourced primarily from renewable energy sources. Therefore, this study provides a cross-study to identify the barriers to nZEB implementation in ten Eastern European countries, including Bulgaria, Croatia, Czechia, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, and Slovakia. The study was conducted between 2019 and 2021 and provides an overview of prospects for nZEB in Eastern Europe. The study examines the challenges of nZEB plans faced in those countries and provides constructive recommendations. The regulations and definitions regarding nZEB energy performance, cooling and heating energy demand, thermal comfort, onsite renewables, and construction quality were analyzed. Results show that most Eastern European countries are unprepared to comply with the EPBD guidelines and cost-optimality approach. The paper ranks each country and recommends specific measures to refine the nZEB definitions. The paper provides a thorough comparative assessment and benchmarking of select EU geography that can help shift the identified gaps into opportunities for the future development of climate-neutral high-performance buildings

Bridging the gap from test rooms to field-tests for human indoor comfort studies: A critical review of the sustainability potential of living laboratories

Occupants play a key role in determining final building energy consumption. Empirical evidence must support occupants’ modelling. Experiments on human responses to Indoor Environmental Quality (IEQ) are usually performed in test rooms or as in-field monitoring. Between these two approaches, living laboratories, often abbreviated as living labs, represent a valid alternative due to their resemblance to real-world settings. This allows observing actual behaviours while keeping the capability to reliably monitor and control the indoor environment. This work systematically reviewed the available information from 34 living labs for human comfort studies worldwide to define the scope, characteristics, and significance of living labs, for the first time. Most of the reviewed living labs are office environments, and only a few do not involve a university research institution in their operation and management. Most of them are in Europe and the United States, whereas there is a lack of such facilities in other locations and climate zones (e.g., tropics). A larger number of comfort studies in living labs is required to clarify the differences in the knowledge acquired in these experiments compared to in-field and laboratory ones. The review shows that living labs add opportunities for testing and optimizing innovations in human-centric solutions for comfortable green buildings. Through the living labs approach it is possible to holistically capture the influence of IEQ on occupant perception and the related response, to gather data on larger and more diverse groups of people, and to conduct multi-domain comfort studies involving multidisciplinary approaches given their real-life settings