Impact of installation faults in air conditioners and heat pumps in single-family homes on U.S. energy usage
To ensure that new residential air conditioners and heat pumps operate optimally, care must be taken during the initial system design and installation to avoid missteps that immediately degrade a system’s performance. Laboratory and simulation studies have quantified the impact that faults can have on capacity and efficiency. Field studies have demonstrated that installation-related faults are commonplace. However, the national impact of installation-related faults cannot be accurately estimated by only simulating a limited number of homes at several fault levels because of the variety of home characteristics and climates involved. In our analysis, we use an improved residential building stock simulation tool to predict the annual energy increase and additional utility costs resulting from two common installation faults: indoor airflow rate and refrigerant charge level. Our method considers the wide range of building characteristics and climate zones of the U.S. housing stock. We use existing field data to develop fault intensity probability distributions to inform our analysis. The study shows that these two faults result in approximately 20.7 TWh/y of additional energy use for central air conditioners and air-source heat pumps in U.S. single-family detached homes, which is a 9% increase over baseline (no-fault) usage, costing homeowners approximately $2.5 billion annually on utility bills. Air-source heat pumps are responsible for a disproportionate fraction of this energy use increase because of the larger number of operating hours compared to central air conditioners and the sensitivity of heating mode performance to the faults analyzed compared to cooling mode.
- Research Organization:
- National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), Golden, CO (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE), Energy Efficiency Office. Building Technologies Office
- Grant/Contract Number:
- AC36-08GO28308
- OSTI ID:
- 1660191
- Report Number(s):
- NREL/JA-5500-75261; MainId:6254; UUID:52503fec-d9f5-e911-9c29-ac162d87dfe5; MainAdminID:16259
- Journal Information:
- Applied Energy, Vol. 278; ISSN 0306-2619
- Publisher:
- ElsevierCopyright Statement
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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Generalized effects of refrigerant charge on normalized performance variables of air conditioners and heat pumps
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journal | April 2017 |
Evaluating the performance of fault detection and diagnostics protocols applied to air-cooled unitary air-conditioning equipment
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journal | July 2013 |
Modeling of HVAC operational faults in building performance simulation
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journal | September 2017 |
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