A study on residential heating energy requirement and optimum insulation thickness

Heat loss from buildings has a considerable share in waste of energy especially in Turkey since no or little insulation is used in existing and new buildings. Therefore, energy savings can be obtained by determining of heat loss characteristics with using proper thickness of insulation. For this purpose, in this study, calculations of optimum insulation thickness are carried out on a prototype building in Bursa as a sample city. Considering long term and current outdoor air temperature records (from 1992 to 2005), degree-hour (DH) values are calculated, and the variation of annual energy requirement of the building is investigated for various architectural design properties (such as air infiltration rate, glazing type, and area). Then, the effects of the insulation thickness on the energy requirement and total cost are presented. Based on life cycle cost (LCC) analysis, the optimum insulation thicknesses are determined for different fuel types. As a conclusion, the length of the heating period is average 221 days, and the mean heating DH value is found as 45 113.2 besides changing between 38 000 and 55 000. The optimum insulation thicknesses for Bursa vary between 5.3 and 12.4 cm depending on fuel types. In addition to this, the variation in Turkey is more dramatically.