Validation of a new method to estimate energy use for space heating and hot water production from low-resolution heat meter data

¹ Department of the Built Environment – Aalborg University, Aalborg, Denmark
² ESTIA SA, EPFL Innovation Park, Lausanne, Switzerland
³ Human-Oriented Built Environment Lab, School of Architecture, Civil and Environmental Engineering, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland
⁴ Department of Industrial Engineering – University of Padova, Padua, Italy

^* corresponding author: dle@build.aau.dk

Abstract

One of the initiatives to reach the European decarbonization goal is the roll-out of smart heating meters in the building stock. However, these meters often record the total energy usage with only hourly resolution, without distinguishing between space heating (SH) and domestic hot water (DHW) production. To tackle this limitation, this paper presents the validation of a new methodology to estimate the SH and DHW from total measurements in different building types in three countries (Denmark, Switzerland, and Italy). The method employs a combined smoothing algorithm with a support vector regression (SVR) to estimate the different heating uses. The estimation results are compared with the different countries’ DHW compliance calculations. The comparison showed that the compliance calculations outperformed this method by considering the validation dataset characteristics.