Optimizing building heat consumption: Weekday and weekend profiles

Abstract

Paper’s objective is to save time for district heating (DH) companies, which are new to the Geographic Information Systems-supported (GIS) modelling and optimizing heat consumption profiles; also to suggest specific guidelines for the system operation within a residential area. A specific case of the real DH network was simulated. A two-stage programming model combining the optimal design and operation of a DH pipe network was developed. We designed an aerial image of the testing area (modified from Google Map by means of QGIS) and to forecast the building thermal energy consumption, we used a pre-collected data set representing the heating season in Omsk, Russia. Weekday and weekend day were taken as the periods for forecasting. Actual profiles and the simulated data were compared. The error differs slightly for both forecasts regardless of a weekday or a weekend day it is. The obtained results are important because the simulation allows to cut off the peaks at 2:00 and 7:00. The error increases when the optimized values differ greater from the heat consumption basic profiles and vice versa. There are clearly visible local peaks induced by the domestic hot water (DHW) use and a manual temperature setting through a weekday. This leads to a larger inconsistency in relation to a weekend day. It is proposed to optimize the system operation, its objective is to minimize the daily heat energy consumption, annual total fuel demand consumption and the annualized cost of the network.

Keywords

• District heating
• Distribution
• Simulation
• Programming
• Model
• Annual