Energy performance of personalized heating: Numerical case study for a medium sized office building including different envelope qualities and climates

Abstract Personalized conditioning systems represent a promising solution for satisfying individual thermal comfort needs in an energy effective way. This study presents an analysis of the energy saving potential of personalized heating in relation to building envelope quality and the outdoor climate. At first, a relation between mitigated cold discomfort and the energy consumption was derived for personalized heating system, which was previously tested in a human subject experiment. At second, a medium sized office building was simulated in four locations from Atlanta to Minneapolis with three different building envelope characteristics corresponding to construction periods from 1970 to 2012. The heating setpoint was reduced from 21 °C to 18 °C, while the cold discomfort was mitigated by a personalized heating composed of a heated chair, a heated floor mat and a heated desk. The results show that the total thermal energy demand can be considerably reduced by applying personalized heating. The energy saving potential in this study reaches up to 73 kWh/m 2 y and generally increases for older buildings in colder climates.