A novel tool to detect abnormal thermal energy consumptions in buildings equipped with limited metering infrastructure

In EU, excessive amounts of energy wastes occur in existing buildings due to mul-tiple reasons, such as: i) the inadequate design of the building; ii) the frequent operation of the technical building systems far from the design and reference conditions; iii) the lack of proper maintenance; iv) the lack of building automation and control systems; v) the occurrence of unexpected or exceptional weather conditions; vi) the occurrence of inappropriate end-user behaviors etc.. In this context, the detection of “abnormal” ener-gy consumptions could be crucial both to inform the end users and to help energy tech-nicians in energy diagnosis. In this paper, the authors present a methodology to detect abnormal thermal energy consumptions in existing buildings equipped with limited me-tering infrastructure such as heat cost allocators and indoor temperature sensors. Four years of daily energy and environmental monitoring data of a case study building locat-ed in Central Italy were used to develop and test a model for data processing, bench-marking, abnormal energy consumption identification and diagnosis. It is believed that the proposed method could be useful not only to building energy managers to track the building operational performance, but also to support the design of simple information systems to increase end users awareness towards an efficient use of thermal energy in existing buildings.