Contrastive survey on summer energy consumption of air conditioning in urban residential buildings with different air conditioning schemes in Wuhan

To acquire the status and differences of energy consumption of different air conditioning schemes in urban residential buildings in hot summer zones, uses the power meter data-split method to survey and analyse contrastively the energy consumptions of air conditioning of 560 households with different air conditioning schemes in a residential quarters in Wuhan in summer, 2012. The results show that the average energy consumption for one household is 758 kWh and the average air conditioning energy index is 5.68 kWh/m² for the households using split air-conditioners and 1 266 kWh and 8.05 kWh/m² for the households using household central air conditioners. The energy index for the latter is 42% higher than that for the former. The level of energy consumption of spilt air conditioner and household central air conditioner is much lower than that of central air conditioning systems. Hence, it is recommended that decentralized air conditioners be adopted for residential buildings. The energy consumption difference of spilt air conditioners among different households is bigger, which shows that there is obviously difference in air conditioning demand and behaviour of using air conditioning among households. It is an important direction for the development of energy saving technology of building air conditioning to satisfy different demands of different households and to make full use of energy saving potential of household air conditioning behaviour.