Annual Performance of a Solar Active House Prototype – Comparing Measurement and Simulation
Abstract
A new concept for solar active houses is being tested under practical conditions. While conventional solar house concepts combine large collector areas with large storage volumes (up to 10 m in a single family house) in order to achieve solar fractions above 50 %, our new concept only needs small storage volumes (1 m ). To substitute the lack of storage capacity, the new system design uses thermally activated concrete elements directly fed by the solar collector. After having been dimensioned and tested by several simulation studies, a prototype building, equipped with the new heating system, has been constructed and extensively monitored. The first year of operation already revealed the concept ́s functionality. During a first monitoring period from April 2015 to March 2016 the recorded data exhibit good agreement with the simulations (based on historical weather data) while storage heat losses are identified as too high. Nonetheless, the annual overall end energy demand for domestic hot water and space heating is 8 kWh/m . This contribution analyses the first year of operation, also covering a peak load test.
Keywords
Solar active house, Energy storage, Thermally activated concrete elements, Tabs, Ground heat exchanger, Heat pump, Experimental study, Prototype measurement