Hotel Adapted to the Requirements of an nZEB Building—Thermal Energy Performance and Assessment of Energy Retrofit Plan

Abstract

Recently, emissions and the energy use of the building and construction sector globally increased. Therefore, energy retrofit processes and reducing the energy consumption of buildings are increasingly often discussed by the academic community, industry, and end-users. The application of high-performance technologies and highly insulating materials results in a low energy demand in newly constructed buildings. A crucial challenge is to reduce energy consumption in existing buildings. The article presents an energy analysis of the reconstruction of a historic building adapted to hotel functionality. Based on the available information on the design of the facility, and the annual demand for cooling and heating energy, simulations of the energy performance were carried out. The proposals to exchange the heat source and replace the existing systems were simulated and assessed. Three different retrofit options were analyzed, including the replacement of the air handling unit (variant 1—v1), bathroom fixtures (v2), and, in the last scenario analyzed (v3), the above-mentioned activities and the usage of tri-generation units. As the results show, such solutions allow for the reduction in final energy consumption of 20%, to 73% regarding the baseline variant.

Simulation and Experimental Study on the Use of Ventilation Air for Space Heating of a Room in a Low-Energy Building

“…However, in thermally modernised objects, the energy required to warm up cold external air supplied to the building's interior is more important [5][6][7]. For this reason, various solutions of ventilation heat recovery are applied both in new and thermally modernised buildings [8][9][10] resulting in lower heating energy demand [11][12][13][14].…”