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Residents of multi-storey buildings expect that the systems operating within the facility will function reliably and in a manner that ensures comfort. One of the systems that improves comfort is water circulation. Unfortunately, its operation is associated with significant costs, especially in the form of heat losses. Various attempts are being made to improve the energy efficiency of this system while maintaining high comfort for users. It seems that limiting the activities to the use of dedicated regulatory fittings is not enough. The use of other solutions, e.g. additional thermal insulation, may be impossible for organizational reasons. A separate issue is the financial matters and cost-effectiveness of such activities.

The requirements concerning energy performance of buildings and their internal installations, particularly HVAC systems, have been growing continuously in Poland and all over the world. The existing, traditional calculation methods following from the static heat exchange model are frequently not sufficient for a reasonable heating design of a building. Both in Poland and elsewhere in the world, methods and software are employed which allow a detailed simulation of the heating and moisture conditions in a building, and also an analysis of the performance of HVAC systems within a building. However, these systems are usually difficult in use and complex. In addition, the development of a simulation model that is sufficiently adequate to the real building requires considerable time involvement of a designer, is time–consuming and laborious. A simplification of the simulation model of a building renders it possible to reduce the costs of computer simulations. The paper analyses in detail the effect of introducing a number of different variants of the simulation model developed in Design Builder on the quality of final results obtained. The objective of this analysis is to find simplifications which allow obtaining simulation results which have an acceptable level of deviations from the detailed model, thus facilitating a quick energy performance analysis of a given building.