Distributed or centralized HVAC: a practical investigation into household heating systems

Three main questions pertaining to household heating were and answered through rigorous empirical testing; • Is it more efficient to keep a house at constant temperature throughout the day, or should the temperature be allowed to dip when unoccupied? • Is it possible to build a scale-model house with proper thermal ballasting to simulate and verify the first question? • Can the empirical results be used to verify whether or not steady state models of heat transfer (for simplicity’s sake) can provide reasonably accurate results? It was observed that keeping a house at constant temperature is inefficient and causes over cycling of electro-mechanical equipment. Continuing on, it is possible to build a scale-model house to mimic reality, however, care is needed in the design process if you wish to have similar volumetric time constants. And finally, steady-state models can be implemented to predict energy input, but with a certain degree of error.