Investigation of occupant-related energy aspects of the National Building Code of Canada: Energy use impact and potential least-cost code-compliant upgrades
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Following our previous study, which indicated that several occupant-related assumptions in the National Building Code (NBC) of Canada are different from findings in recent measurement-based studies, this study aims to: i) quantify the direct energy impact associated with discrepancies between the current code’s occupant-related assumptions and those obtained from recent measurement-based studies and ii) demonstrate how key NBC requirements could be reevaluated as a result of the new/proposed occupant-related assumptions. In this regard, this paper applies energy modeling and life cycle costing (LCC) to 11 representative archetypes across different Canadian climate zones. First, EnergyPlus simulations were conducted to evaluate the energy impact of the proposed and existing occupant-related assumptions. Second, LCC was used to evaluate code requirements’ economic implications under these two sets of occupant assumptions. Our results indicate that the default occupant-related assumptions used by NBC generally lead to higher predicted heating, but lower cooling, energy consumption. However, heating energy is more significant since heating energy use is typically an order of magnitude higher than cooling energy use for Canadian homes. Our analysis also indicates that the current occupant-related NBC assumptions yield different optimal potential code-compliant upgrades in some cases relative to the new energy-related occupant assumptions.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it