Experimental on a novel solar energy heating system for residential buildings in cold zone of China

Abstract The traditional Chinese Kang system is a kind of ancient domestic heating system, which is still widely used in nearly 85% of rural homes in northern china. However, this system has the disadvantages of heating the room by burning biomaterials directly, which will cause serious environmental pollution. Inspired by the Chinese Kang system, a novel contacting heating sys-tem was proposed in this research. Solar-assisted air source heat pump was employed as heating source for the system. By change the temperature of supplied water, this system can be served as a heating bed, a heating chair or a radiant heating terminal for residential buildings. In order to verify the feasibility of the system, an experimental system has been set up and a series of experimental tests were carried out. The experimental results shown that this system can satisfy all the residents’ heating demands in residential buildings. Moreover, the proportion of the solar energy to the total energy consumption of the system even greater than 60%. These results may lead to the development of designing and distributing the solar energy for building heating during winter.