Abstract
In the House Design Studies commissioned by the Energy Technology Support Unit of the UK Department of Trade and Industry, the thermal performance of forty-three different house designs, incorporating passive solar features, was simulated for comparison with the simulated performance of selected 'reference' and 'upgraded reference' houses. The simulations were not performed by the authors of this paper. An overview of this project, also carried out by others, provided a qualitative indication of the relative solar performance of the designs and references, but no quantitative analysis of the data. This paper seeks to redress this omission by analysing the data from the project to determine the relative energy savings due to insulation and solar gains. Taking the simulations at face value, the results indicate that in most cases the savings in auxiliary energy were largely due to the effects of insulation, with only very small savings arising from the incorporation of 'passive solar' design features.
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