Testing adaptive indoor comfort with lower supply water temperature (55-45DegC)

[mkdg]

Hi,

I would like to test if a living room stays comfortable when lowering the supply temperature (from 90-70 to 55-45) and keeping the existing radiators. I would like to use adaptive comfort recipes and evaluate the number of hours below the 20% PPD limit. The test case is a simple apartment with radiators type 22, an existing gas boiler and poor insulated envelope. I would like to iterate renovation scenarios with a lower supply temperature and check the amount of too cold hours.
Please see my test attached.

Question 1) I have LBT 1.4 installed and I cannot use IB with this version of ladybug. So I try to find a workaround on how to lower the supply temperature using the existing templates. I assume that low temperature heating is generated from sustainable sources such as heat pump or district heating. Is there a template that would be best fit for such scenario? I’ve considered:

Question 2) To test my renovation cases I also calculate the amount of heat losses per part of the building envelope. For some reason for this model, only the windows seem to have heat losses and no gains:

Thank you for your help!
test_LT.gh (152.6 KB)

[Erikbeeren]

Hi @mkdg,

It is possible to use Iron Bug with the new LBT components. Look at the discussion here:

Using Ironbug with the new HB-Energy plugin

Hi @Tokarzewski, Ok, now I understand why you are asking. I think this is totally possible. When we add HVAC system configuration (you called it as graphs) to HBJson, you should be able to access it from Python since we are also generating the Python SDK for Honeybee Schema. Ironbug can take this HVAC system configuration from HBJson and translate it to OpenStudio file for simulation. So for you, you don’t need to deal with Ironbug directly, and you just need to create the HVAC system configu…

[charlie.brooker]

Interesting question! If I was trying to do this as simply as I could in IES I would find out the heat output of the radiator for the lower temperature and then input that as the heating capacity for the zone. It doesn’t seem we can currently limit heating/cooling capacity in the zone - @chris / @MingboPeng is setting heating/cooling capacities per zone something that you’d be interested in bringing into HB? Or is that outside HBs scope and sits with IB?

[chris]

Hey @charlie.brooker ,

You can limit the heating/cooling capacity of an ideal air system with the HB Ideal Air component but trying to implement something similar for all of the detailed HVAC template systems is difficult since it’s not always clear which piece of HVAC equipment should be limited in size in order to restrict the heating/cooling capacity (eg. Boiler, heating coil, zone equipment, air loop for all-air systems).

Grated, if you use IronBug to assign your HVAC system, you can limit the size of whatever equipment you want. So this would be my suggestion of you need to customize the heating/cooling capacity of a detailed system.