Application of data mining in understanding the charging patterns of the hot water tank in a residential building: A case study

Abstract

Today's buildings are adequately informative because of the wide implementation of the building automation system (BAS). In this regard, data mining (DM) tools have an excellent ability to interpret and discover interesting, unknown information from raw data collected from BAS. The present work is a case study, in which DM tools (such as clustering and decision tree) are applied to understand the operational pattern of a hot water storage tank (sanicube) used in a residential building, located in Scotland. The main objective of this study is to explore the correlation among the important features (storage tank temperature, solar collector, the operation of the sanicube heating element, etc.) in the chosen building. Interesting correlations and patterns between the solar collector, storage tank, sanicube-heating element are explored. The clustering results show the existence of different charging patterns of the storage tank and it highly influences the space heating (SH) and domestic hot water (DHW) temperature. The main inference from the result is that the charging of the storage tank is not automatic, and it is influenced by the occupancy behaviour. To maintain the temperature of the storage tank and subsequently to meet the SH and DHW demand, the operation of both solar collector and sanicube heating element (during night time) is recommended rather than operating only the solar collector.