• Energy Research
• Buildings close

Unlike urban dwellings, it is very common for elderly people to stay at home alone in Chinese rural families, and some families have three generations in the same house who are in different situations, and their different family patterns lead to different highly sensitive parameters of building energy consumption. This paper first selects the three most common family patterns based on a questionnaire survey. The measured energy consumption behavior and electrical parameters, energy consumption time, and basic building parameters were input into DesignBuilder to build three building simulation models, and these were verified by comparing the predicted and measured values of the residential month-by-month electricity consumption. The global sensitivity analysis was then conducted using DesignBuilder software to determine the interactions between the variables by using the second-order Sobol index for cooling load, heating load, and comfort of the models to obtain standardized regression coefficients (SRC) for each factor to determine the most sensitive parameters. The results show that the different household patterns had little influence on the ranking of highly sensitive factors for heating and cooling, but annual electricity consumption and discomfort in different household patterns had a significant influence on the ranking of highly sensitive factors. For example, model 1 showed the most sensitivity to general lighting power density when optimizing the total amount of electricity was the goal, while the one that had the greatest degree of influence on the total amount of electricity in model 2 and model 3 was equipment power density.