Impact of low investment strategies for space heating control: Application of thermostatic radiators valves to an old residential building

With an old mean construction age, Italian buildings are considered as long-lasting goods; 75% and 17% of Italian live respectively in buildings built before 1990 and before 1950. The potential energy savings that can be achieved from the refurbishment of existing dwellings are clearly high. To this regard, the European Directive EPBD recast defines a comparative framework to improve buildings energy performance aiming to the nearly zero energy target by 2020. It is thus important to point out energy retrofit actions to be widely applied to the whole existing buildings stock and to be cost optimal. This paper analyzes the application of space heating control devices such as thermostatic radiators valves (TRVs) on an old existing multi-family building in Turin by means of the EnergyPlus dynamic simulation code. Measured data of the energy supplied by the district heating network were used for calibrating the model. In order to evaluate the impact of the TRVs, simulations were performed with and without TRVs. The application of the dynamic energy simulation to different patterns of TRVs use was proved to bring back significant energy savings from a minimum of 2% up to a maximum of 10%.