Energy audit in Fridhemsskolan : A preschool in Gävle municipality

Abstract: This thesis is about the energy audit in Fridhemsskolan which is an educational facility. Fridhemsskolan is a preschool for children in Gävle municipality for children up to the age of six years and comprise of nine buildings in total. The project begins with an energy survey on the school facilities which ranges from checking the ventilation system, lightning system, number of occupants, equipment’s types and so on. The next step was to use a simulation program software called indoor climate and energy (IDA ICE) to create the base model for the building and input the data collected during the energy survey directly into the software and simulate it for a period of one year. After creating the base model, the total electricity use of the building was around 89 MWh/year while the district heating was 157 MWh/year.The energy conservation opportunities in Fridhemsskolan for the building was divide into two categories and these are referred to as non-retrofitting (no or minimal cost) and retrofitting (with cost) recommendations. The non-retrofitting involves reducing the indoor temperature and with this approach; the district heating consumption was reduced to 147.6 MWh/year which amount to 9.34 MWh/year in savings for the district heating while the electricity consumption was reduced to 86.4 MWh/year which amount to 2.6 MWh/year in savings for the electricity.Retrofitting (with cost) recommendations involves looking at the base model and see where some improvements can be carried out. In this research, the roof of the building has more energy losses and retrofitting with cost analysis was performed on that part of the building envelope.After retrofit, the district heating consumption was reduced to 142 MWh/year which is about 15 MWh/year in saving for the district heating while the electricity consumption was reduced to 26 MWh/year which also amount to 63 MWh/year saving in electricity consumption. The reason for this sharp decrease in the electrical consumption was because, the electrical radiators in the base model of the building was replaced with ideal heaters that uses district heating as the energy carrier and 170 mm of mineral wool was also added to the roof.Finally the research further looks at the thermal comfort and the indoor air quality of the occupants in the building by analysing the data on both thermal comfort and the indoor air quality to see if the value obtained are within the acceptable range. In most cases the value is within the acceptable range like in the case of carbon dioxide (CO₂) concentration in theiiioccupied zone, the value obtained after reducing the indoor temperature was less than 1000 parts-per-million (ppm) and that shows that the carbon dioxide (CO₂) concentration is within an acceptable level in the room. The thermal comfort of the occupants in the occupied zone was within the acceptable limit. However, lowering indoor temperature increases the PPD for both buildings. The percentage of the total occupant hours with thermal dissatisfaction increases to 13% from 14 % for Hus 9 and from 13% to 15% for Hus (4-8).