Different Strategies for Building Energy Consumption Assessment, from Mandatory Regulation to Field Measurements

Building overall energy consumptions can be assessed by means of different strategies: calculations according with international standards and local regulations, building dynamic simulations by building energy simulation software, and field measurements. The authors aim to assess these methods in order to understand reliability of regulations and dynamic simulations compared to real measurements in a residential building made up of 3 apartments. Different results between actual mandatory regulation and real energy consumption have been pointed out. The use of building energy simulation software ensures higher accuracy with differences ranging from 6 to 16%, in the present case study. Mandatory regulations could be considered a simplified way to assess energy consumption of a building, but real consumptions might be very different. Anyway, even building energy simulation tools allow the achievement of high accuracies only after the detailed input of occupants’ real behaviours.