Improving Heat Energy Measurement in Houses and Buildings

The idea of district heating is to heat up a whole district from a central source through a distribution network. The Swedish district heating industry is a business with revenue of approximately 19.8 billion SEK (as of 2002). Considering an error of 1% in energy delivered, that is a loss of 198 million SEK, which justifies the current research. I have chosen to study the heat measurement errors due to dynamic load imposed on the household because they are the least investigated and presumably account for a substantial portion of the total measurement error. I have delimited my research area to include single family houses and small buildings, since the effects of dynamic heat load on heat metering are more important in this kind of dwelling. Based on analysis of the measurement strategies, an adaptive algorithm and a feed-forward method are proposed to reduce the heat measurement errors due to the dynamic heat demand. Simulations conducted show that the adaptive algorithm has a higher measurement accuracy than existing heat meters. The feed-forward method has the highest measurement accuracy compared to both existing heat meters and the adaptive algorithm.