Toward a Parametric Model for Major Household Systems Performance

With the residential sector representing approximately 16.6% of total energy consumption in Canada (OEE, 2006) and 21% in the United States(DOE, 2008), decisions that homeowners make on upgrades in their homes can have a large impact on national energy usage and greenhouse gas emissions. Since there remains a large amount of aging housing stock in Canada and worldwide, it is important to focus on educating the homeowners themselves in order to have a positive effect on home renovation projects. In fact, many studies have been conducted to survey and estimate the current state of national building stock in: Canada (Parekh, 2005), U.S.A. (Persily et al, 2006), Europe (Petersdorf et al, 2006), and Japan (Shimoda et al, 2003).These databases of building stock can help to identify major areas needing renovations in order to decrease residential total energy usage. Also, inclusion of these databases into the model would help to identify the best choice of defaults for a given user, based on information from the databases.