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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Built Environ.
Sec. Sustainable Design and Construction
Volume 10 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fbuil.2024.1426774
This article is part of the Research Topic Toward Sustainable Futures: Optimizing Building Energy Consumption for a Greener Built Environment View all articles

Assessing the validity of simplified heating and cooling demand calculation methods: The case of Passive House Planning Package (PHPP) and Radiant Time Series Method (RTSM)

Provisionally accepted
Bashar Al Shawa Bashar Al Shawa *
  • Joule Consulting Group, Bath, United Kingdom

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    To align the buildings sector with the 1.5°C climate change trajectory, enormous improvements in energy efficiency are needed. It is therefore crucial that the tools used to evaluate buildings’ energy use undergo robust testing. This paper tests, for the first time, the outcome of the Passive House Planning Package (PHPP) and an author-modified version of the Radiant Time Series Method (RTSM), following the Building Energy Simulation Test (BESTEST). The results show that while the validity of the modified-RTSM is slightly superior to that of the PHPP, both tools pass less than 35% of the cases – necessitating further calibration and challenging the widely-held belief that the PHPP is ‘validated’. As the PHPP and the modified-RTSM present a relatively simple and quick way of evaluating buildings’ energy performance, calibrating their methodologies so they pass the BESTEST cases could put them at an advantage over the fully dynamic and resource-intensive tools.

    Keywords: Building energy simulation (BES), Verification & validation, comparative test, BESTEST validation procedure, PHPP (Passive House Planning Package), Radiant time series method

    Received: 02 May 2024; Accepted: 24 Jun 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Al Shawa. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Bashar Al Shawa, Joule Consulting Group, Bath, United Kingdom

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.