High resolution measured domestic hot water consumption of Canadian homes

Abstract The modeling and simulation of domestic hot water systems, including solar thermal and co-generation technologies, relies on accurate, high time-step resolution water consumption profiles. Due to the expensive nature of field studies, previous profiles have been limited in number of participants, or have been generated synthetically using probabilistic modelling techniques. The Solar City program in Halifax has measured hot water flow rate and temperature data in 119 homes at a time-step of 1 min; and includes a survey of occupancy rates and other relevant meta-data. In this paper, we discuss the data acquisition and processing (with a focus on flow rate data), and conduct analysis to reveal consumption trends and produce a new set of time-step profiles for modeling and simulation. Average hot water consumption per household is 172 L/day with a strong dependency on number of occupants. The hourly profile peaks twice daily, and shifts by several hours on Sunday. The average draw temperature was found to be 51.8 °C, which is lower than the default value of 55 °C applied by many building modeling/simulation packages. The average cold water supply temperature was found to be roughly sinusoidal about 12.4 °C with approximately one-month lag compared to ambient air temperature.