Results Monitoring

Download Annex 49 Report part 2 – Monitoring of nZEB with heat pump

 
Monitoring of heat pumps in nZEB in IEA HPT Annex 49
A strong focus of the Annex 49 contributions of the participating countries were in total more than 15 monitoring projects in different types of nZEB with heat pump. Thereby, the focus was set in many projects on larger residential and also non-residential buildings, which put higher challenges on the building concepts to achieve ambitious performance targets for the nZE balance. Actually, many projects set an even higher ambition level in the project than would be required by the national legal requirements in the countries. Thereby, however, also the limits are partly much stricter and the design targets could not be achieved in all projects. On the other hand, by the stricter requirements, limitations become clearly visible and optimisation potentials can be assessed. Henceforth, some of the monitoring projects are also accom­pa­nied with in-depth investigations by simulations.

Many of the projects also comprise long-term monitoring over several years, which enables to evaluate year-to-year changes in the system performance and to assess the energy reduction achieved by applied optimisation measures.

As general conclusions the performance of the heat pump in the different investigated nZEB applications yield high seasonal performance factors (SPF), which facilitates to fulfil the nZE balance requirement. In many projects SPF values in the range of 5 and higher are reached, which surpass market averages. By the combination of the high performance building envelope and thereby high heat pump performance due to low temperature requirements, in particular in the new built sector, the necessity for on-site renewable energy productions is reduced which may be a challenge in particular for larger buildings. Thereby, nZEB legal requirements can be a market driver for the application of heat pumps also in larger and non-residential buildings, since other system options may not be able to meet the requirements, in particular if higher ambition levels are envisaged.

Furthermore, projects confirm a robust operation of the heat pump over the multi-year moni­toring periods, but also optimisation potentials can be found in the monitoring, in particular in the first year of commissioning. Especially for new integration options and system concepts a monitoring shall necessarily be provided for function control and derive a stable and regular operation in the commissioning phase and to gather experience with the system for optimisa­tion.