Monitoring system of an energy efficient school building

”Politehnica” University of Timisoara, Faculty of Civil Engineering, Civil Engineering and Services Department, 2 Traian Lalescu Street, Timisoara, Romania

^* Corresponding author: iosif.boros@student.upt.ro

Abstract

The paper presents details regarding the implemented monitoring system of heat loss, interior comfort and energy consumption particularities of an energy efficient school building in Romania. Despite the fact that there is an emphasis on energy saving and sustainability in the building industry legislation and policies, there are still too few examples of good practice at local level. Recent trends have brought changes in how designers solve specific details like thermal insulation thicknesses and use of renewable energy but further improvement is required for a more detailed understanding of the entire building's energy balance behaviour both on overall and specific details level. Therefore, a complex monitoring system was built in a carefully designed and constructed school building in order to collect relevant real-time data of every specific part of the thermal envelope, the HVAC systems and interior comfort parameters. The main purpose of the system is to highlight the order of magnitude of the differences between the design and the real-time values of the most significant parameters, the importance of each detail and also the need of further research development in this field.