Long-term field investigation and modeling of electricity end-use patterns in hotel guest rooms

Abstract This paper presents the results of a long-term, detailed electricity end-use analysis of hotel guest rooms in order to provide a better understanding of the electricity use patterns in guest rooms and their explanatory factors. To accomplish this, a one-year of sub-hourly electricity measurements for an entire floor and major electricity end uses of fourteen guest rooms in a case-study hotel in Washington, D.C. were analyzed along with coincident weather and occupancy data collection. A regression analysis was performed on the monthly and daily end-use electricity data to identify key variables affecting different electricity end uses of the guest rooms. As a result, it was found that a regression model with a single temperature variable did not fully describe the electricity use behaviors of hotel guest rooms. The addition of the occupancy variable significantly improved the model fit for both monthly and daily total floor electricity use and was statistically significant. A review of the electricity end uses showed strong correlations between outdoor temperature and the electricity end uses for space conditioning, especially the DOAS unit and the VRF outdoor unit. However, for other end uses such as plug loads, lighting, and the VRF indoor units, the observed correlations to outdoor temperature were not significant but were moderately correlated to occupancy.