The Retrofitting Design Planner Tool – RetroSim

The Heat4Cool project developed a Retrofitting Design Planner Tool, also called RetroSim (available here), which is an online tool providing an easy and quick estimation of the energetic and economic performances of HVAC retrofit scenarios in residential buildings.

RetroSim currently supports six generic layouts of heating/cooling systems. Three of them describe some of the most frequently encountered heating/cooling configurations in European residential buildings, while two are tailored to include solutions developed and provided through the Heat4Cool project.

The user is asked to enter the characteristics of an existing building, including location, geometry, and existing heating/cooling systems (default values are proposed to aid this). Based on the inputs, the tool generates several scenarios incorporating the Heat4Cool technologies that are compatible and calculates their energy performance. Finally, a result page is presented to the user with all the scenarios are ranked, considering energy consumption, greenhouse gas emissions as well as the comfort range achieved.

RetroSim aims to provide support to users (such as residents, building administrators, engineers, architects, etc.) in finding the optimum retrofit solution for a particular building, by evaluating the potential range of innovative heating and cooling technologies developed within this project, thus configuring the best solution based on the information provided.