Proposal of a system for diagnosing with inefficient occupant behaviour and systems malfunctioning in the household sector

One of the key factors in curbing energy consumption in the household sector, together with energy efficiency and renewable energies, is widely recognized to be the amendment of occupant erroneous behaviour and systems malfunctioning, mainly explained by the lack of awareness of the final user. The aim of this work is to propose a diagnostic system in the household sector which can improve the users’ awareness with respect to the energy consumption in final uses. In particular, this paper presents an energy, environmental and economic analysis of different diagnostics systems, corresponding to different degrees of complexity and cost. Given a reference occupancy and thermal user profile, for each diagnostic system the relevant energy consumption is assessed by simulation and the subsequent economic savings are calculated and compared to the diagnostic system cost in order to evaluate the payback period of the architecture proposed.