Abstract
Energy efficient retrofit strategies should not only enhance the energy performance of the building in a cost effective way, but also improve, or at least, not compromise the indoor thermal comfort during the all year, even when system is off. Even if the indoor thermal comfort is commonly not included among the objectives of the optimization process, a well-known problem of highly insulated buildings is that, if not correctly managed, they can undergo to important overheating issues. On the other hand, it is also true that, under discomfort conditions, occupants tend to react, making adjustments (operating the windows and/or the shading devices), to improve their thermal comfort sensation. In this paper, the influence of the occupants’ adaptation on the definition of the optimal solutions for building retrofits has been investigated considering a set of reference building modules, representative of the Italian building stock and located in two typical Italian climates. In a first stage, the optimization of retrofits has been carried out evaluating the nominal performance, without considering the building management operated by the occupants as adaptation measure to uncomfortable conditions. In a second stage, the performance of the optimal solutions has been recalculated including some user-operated management actions and the differences between nominal and adapted performance assessed. This allows evaluating the efficacy of an appropriate management of the building by the occupants, through windows and shading operation, and its impact on nominal estimated performance. Finally, the optimization has been repeated including the adaptive management actions to investigate the possibility that some of the retrofit configurations neglected in the first optimization could reveal better performance than the selected ones.