The effect of unheated users on residential building in heating performance

In the Chinese district heating network, unheated users generally exist in multi-family residential buildings, which adversely affects the heating performance of the whole building and its surrounding users. These effects are directly related to the fairness of heat metering and the rationality of system adjustment. Aiming to study this effect, a model of a multi-family residential heating system that considering the thermo-hydraulic coupling is developed and calibrated. Then, the possible adjacencies between unheated and heating users are described by eight different building areas and three relative user locations. Furthermore, based on the model, this paper analyses the effect of the unheated user on the heating users in different adjacencies and adjustment conditions. Lastly, the influence of unheated users in different areas is studied under different adjustment conditions. The result shows that upside unheated user has the most significant effect on heating users. Under the original condition, the building system is most affected by the unheated user on the ground floor, with a relative heat consumption rate (RHCR) greater than 45%. Under the adjustment condition, the RHCR of the system increases significant, but the difference between unheated users is noticeably reduced; the RHCR is 50–70%.