Method for Determining Design Heating Load of Rural Residential Buildings Considering Indoor Temperature Uncertainty

Abstract

In rural locations, the application of clean heating technologies requires an appropriate design heating load. However, the variation characteristics of indoor temperatures in rural residential buildings are rarely taken into consideration by traditional techniques of calculating the design heating load, which may result in over- or under-design. As a result, a new method that took the uncertainty of the indoor temperature into account was presented to calculate the design heating load for rural residential buildings. First, for the “part-time, part-space” heating mode in rural residential buildings, an indoor temperature stochastic model was established to generate multiple indoor temperature scenarios; on the basis of this, heating loads under these scenarios were simulated and their probability distributions were counted; lastly, the design heating load was selected from the load probability distribution based on a predetermined confidence level. When the new method and the traditional method were compared, it was discovered that the new method can offer a more thorough guide to the determination of the design load value for the design of heating systems in rural residential buildings, while the traditional method’s result might not satisfy the reliability requirements.