Control strategies for heating systems

A controller for heating systems is normally equipped with many facilities to make it flexible and the heating system more cost-efficient. This results in a number of input parameters to be given by the user. It is not obvious how to choose appropriate values for these parameters unless the user has a large experience in this field. The aim of this paper is to reduce the number of parameters, with thermal comfort and energy consumption intact. This paper will show the benefits with a feedback from the room temperature. First it will be shown that a room temperature feedback will lower the energy consumption and improve the thermal comfort compared to other strategies with night-time set back. Once the indoor temperature sensor is used, the measurement can be used to calculate a model of the system, together with outdoor temperature and supply water temperature by using system identification. The model is then used to reduce the number of input parameters. Both measurements and simulations are used in this paper. This allows various aspects to be compared for different solutions under the same conditions.