An Analysis of International Energy Conservation Code (IECC)-Compliant Single-Family Residential Energy Use

摘要

In 2001, the Texas State Senate passed Senate Bill 5 to reduce ozone levels by encouragingthe reduction of emissions of NOx that were not regulated by the Texas Natural ResourceConservation Commission, including point sources (power plants), area sources (such as residentialemissions), road mobile sources, and non-road mobile sources. For the building energy section, theTexas State Legislature adopted the 2000/2001 International Energy Conservation Code, asmodified by the 2001 Supplement, as the state's building energy code. The 2000/2001 IECC is acomprehensive energy conservation code that establishes a standard for the insulation levels,glazing and cooling and heating system efficiencies through the use of prescriptive andperformance-based provisions.Therefore, the purpose of this research is to improve the accuracy of a 2000/2001 IECCcompliantperformance simulation using the DOE-2.1e simulation program to investigate the energyperformance of a typical single-family house. To achieve this purpose, several objectives had to beaccomplished, including: 1) the development of an IECC-compliant simulation model, 2) thedevelopment and testing of specific improvements to the existing code-traceable model, 3) thecalibration and installation of sensors in a case-study house, 4) the validation of the improved simulation model with measured data from the case-study house, and 5) use the validated model tosimulate the energy-conserving features of single-family residences that cannot be simulated withexisting versions of the DOE-2.1e program.In order to create the code-traceable IECC-compliant simulation model, a base-case housesimulation was created and the results calibrated with measured energy and environmental datafrom the case-study house. This was done in order to obtain an improved simulation model thatwould more accurately represent the case-study building. The calibrated model was then used toverify the accuracy of the improved simulation methods against previous models and measured data.After validation of the new simulation methodologies, the IECC simulation model was usedto simulate different energy-conserving features for a single-family residence that could not besimulated with the previous version of the DOE-2 input file. Finally, areas for future work wereidentified in an effort to continue to improve the model.