Is monthly and whole building level calibration enough? A detailed modeling and calibration study of an ultra-efficient occupancy simulated house

This paper presents a detailed hourly whole building energy calibration study of a carefully instrumented and controlled ultra-efficient research house. The paper describes the calibration process at annual, monthly, daily and hourly level as well as building end-use level of a whole building energy model developed in EnergyPlus. The study shows that it is relatively easy to calibrate the model for monthly whole building energy use. However, that does not necessary mean that individual cooling or heating energy use calibrated correctly. The paper emphasizes that the purpose of calibration process should not be to adjust any input parameter to match the simulation results with measured data but to create a model, which represent the real building as close as possible. The paper also discusses some findings of the calibration process (e.g., using monthly calibration vs. daily calibration, whole building calibration vs. end use level calibration, etc.). The final results show the daily normalized mean bias error (NMBE) and coefficient of variation of the root mean square error, CV(RMSE), between the measured and simulated results of 0.18% and 10.35% respectively.