Radiator and floor heating operative temperature and temperature variation corrections for EN 15316-2 heat emission standard

•Draft standard prEN 15316-2:2014 tabulated values were conducted with dynamic simulation.•Operative temperature corrections were calculated to provide occupant thermal comfort.•Operative temperature setpoint decreased temperature variation for floor heating 0.1 K.•The radiator and floor heating with PI controller can be considered equally efficient.•Differences between wet and dry floor heating was only 0.1 K.

In this paper new draft standard prEN 15316:2-2014 was tested against detailed dynamic simulation and an operative temperature corrections were developed in order to enable fair comparison of heat emitters to provide equal thermal comfort for occupants. Simple one room model with different number of external envelope elements and two occupant positions were used to analyze operative temperature effects. Operative temperature corrections and comparative analyses with the tabulated values of the standard were conducted with two low energy reference building simulation models in two climates. The use of the operative temperature set-point increased the temperature variation in the case of radiator heating by 0.2–0.3 K and decreased it in the case of floor heating by 0.1 K. However, in the case of floor heating the occupant location effect provided an additional increase of 0.1 K which compensated the operative temperature effect, i.e. no correction is needed for floor heating. For the radiator heating the operative temperature variation of 0.25 K is to be added, but this increase falls well within the safety margin of about 0.35 K of existing tabulated values. The comparison of the emission efficiency of the radiator and floor heating revealed equally efficient by the PI controller.