Hello,
We are renovating a 1905 two-story small historical landmark building as a 12 room boutique hotel, thus cannot include HVAC systems due to planning and preservation restrictions, and the location does not have 4 seasons or summer/winter peaks, with a constant temperature all year long. For thermal comfort at night we are using an efficient electrical wall heater per room which the guest can turn on or off as needed. For this "optimize energy performance" pre-req and credits we are doing a whole building simulation, and do not know how to best include the wall heaters in the comparison, as we do not want the energy model to be rejected for wrong inputs in the system. So far we are including the wall heaters as miscellaneous loads, with the actual consumption of the panel in each room, and will be modeling the baseline with the same load. The question is if this load can actually be considered in plug loads or miscellaneous loads or does it need to be modeled as heating load? how to do this when the units do not turn on at a set point but rather the user decides to turn it on or of? Can we get away with including it in the design case but eliminating it from the baseline to avoid confusion even if this results in lower energy reduction for the design case?
Marcus Sheffer
LEED Fellow7group / Energy Opportunities
LEEDuser Expert
5911 thumbs up
March 15, 2016 - 8:15 pm
It must be modeled as heating. It cannot be placed in the space as a load because it is the system that must meet the heating load. If you have electric space heating in a hotel room the baseline will be a packaged terminal heat pump so you cannot model the baseline with the same load.
To model the operation you will need to assume a set point and then develop a schedule with will most accurately reflect the expected operation of the system.
If you include it in the design case and exclude it from the baseline the savings will increase and that would not be acceptable.