Integral planning tool for thermal renovation and Heat Pump application in multi-apartment buildings [28]

The thermal renovation of the building stock represents an important contribution to the achievement of climate protection goals. Heat Pumps will undoubtedly dominate the heating of buildings in the future, at least in places where district heating or biomass is not possible.

In the thermal renovation of existing buildings, Heat pump systems must be carefully planned and implemented to ensure robust and efficient operation. The planning includes the heat distribution and heat emission concept, source development and building integration including onsite PV integration.

Attention must be paid to the lowest possible flow temperatures and outputs. In particular, minimal noise emissions are to be aimed at. The development and evaluation of innovative solutions for the highly efficient renovation of apartment buildings and for the switch to Heat Pump-based heating is complex and demanding and requires expert knowledge from both building physics and HVAC planning offices as well as a detailed information on technical and non-technical boundary conditions.

In order to be able to offer targeted planning in an early but essential decision-making phase, the engineering offices (buildings physics, HVAC, energy consultant) must be able to rely on planning tools (spreadsheets) and databases and cooperate in an integral design process right from the start.

Based on the RENEWnow project (FFG, Nachhaltwirtschaften.at), a workflow was developed with which the thermal renovation and the efficiency of different heat pump solutions (central, semi-central, decentralized) can be evaluated and compared. This includes the distribution and storage losses as well as the efficiency of the Heat Pump depending on the necessary flow temperature (depending on the heat emission systems and the heating load of the building).

In the project HP_Reno_Calc (Renowave.at) a spreadsheet-based planning tool is being developed for the evaluation and comparison of different thermal renovation variants and Heat pump solutions for multi-story residential buildings.

This contribution presents the development of a spreadsheet-based approach as an extension for existing spreadsheet tools (such as the PHPP) to support the targeted planning of thermal renovations and the switch to Heat Pump-based heating systems. The user-friendly presentation of the results (e.g. energy flow diagrams) should also allow optimization of the systems and simple communication.