Thermal Loads Map and Overall Energy Analysis Depending on Low-Effort Parameters Change: A Commercial Building Case Study

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Dear Author,

your article is just about a case study, I don't find any news to scientific community, I suggest to revise and to re-submitt.

Author Response

The author would thank the reviewer for the time spent to review the manuscript. Based on the reviewers’ comment, a deep revision has been carried out and the author hopes the manuscript has been improved enough.

Reviewer 2 Report

The paper is dealing with a study on “Thermal loads map and overall energy analysis depending on low-effort parameters change. A commercial building case study.”. Before considering this work for the publication, the following points need to be improved:

 

1-     The abstract should be restructured. The abstract not only briefly explains the research goal, but also briefly gives the main results and the main conclusions.

2-     The rationale of the study should be discussed more clearly in the Introduction section. An updated and complete literature review should be conducted.

3-     Please add a list of key contributions of this study.

4-      Please present in-depth analysis and interpretation in connection to results.

5-     The authors really need to specify clearly how their present work and results relate to others and what their main contributions are? Make specific recommendations and highlight new knowledge gained from this study.

6-     The results presented by the authors are short descriptions of figures and tables but there is little interpretation and explanation to the obtained data and results. The obtained results, figures, and tables should be more detailed and deeper explain.

7-     In the conclusion, the important numerical results of the work should be given. Improve the narrative of this section. Without going into too much detail, article should be given to the presentation of the data.

8--There are more up-to-date methods why this method was used.

 

Author Response

The author really appreciated the reviewer’s recommendations which were extremely useful to improve the manuscript quality.
The abstract has been deeply reviewed to provide a comprehensive overview of the work.
The Introduction section has been revised with aim of pointing out the rationale of the work, the main contribution to the state-of-art and the actual novelty proposed.
The description of the results have been extended and better explained, and the conclusion have been revised.

Reviewer 3 Report

In general

This manuscript is written clearly, transparently, and logically. However, this manuscript contains minor stylistic errors and one misprint in the figure.

In specific

Lines 99-102. It was written “The three parameters are administrative (heating/cooling set-point temperature and working shift) and building-related (infiltration rate) and they have been defined based on the ease of achievement, being effortless and low-effort, respectively”.

This sentence was not clearly spelled. The reviewer understood this sentence only after reading the results section. This sentence should be rewritten.

Lines 267-356. The section on final and primary energy was not clearly listed as one of the goals of the study in the introductory section. This goal of the study should be stated in the introduction.

Line 345. It was written “…the three dashed lines depict…”

However, Figure 12 only shows the two dashed lines. Figure 12 needs to be redrawn.

Author Response

The author would thank the reviewer for the “In general” comment and especially for the valuable “In specific” comments that he tried to address in order to enhance the work.
Thank you for point out the not-clear sentence of lines 99-102. It has been rewritten as follows:
“The three parameters are heating/cooling set-point temperature, working shift and infiltration rate and they have been identified based on the ease of achievement; in fact, the first two parameters are administrative and their variation is effortless while the third is a building-related feature that can be changed with low effort.”
The author is very grateful to the reviewer for the comment about lines 267-356. In order to include the final and primary energy goal, the last paragraph of the Introduction section has been significantly improved.
Finally, the figure 12 has been corrected and now includes three dashed lines.

Reviewer 4 Report

I respect the research work of the author, I do not discuss his measured parameters or his panel interpretation of data. Still, I have a few recommendations for the author:

1. The article must include an aim and some objectives for research (there is only a general aim included in the Abstract area) resulting the methodology for the research. The research methods must be matched with the proposed objectives.

2. Practically, the manuscript is a case study (an empirical research) of a three floors building in Rome, Italy, which is not mandatory representative for millions of buildings around the world.

3. In an empirical research, the three proposed parameters as the basis for the research must be representative for the research and related to other previous research. Furthermore, the measured data must be compared to other similar data from previous or similar research. The state of research in the field is poorly presented.

4. The conclusions must be fully assumed, not only from the technical perspective. For instance, the reduction of the working week from 5 to 3 days, telework, or work from home can be applied on a very small scale, only in certain rather limited areas, and such a conclusion can have significant social connotations that were not signaled in this article. Concretely, in order to save energy at work, the solution is not to close the office and work from home (which would increase energy consumption at home, among other things, would significantly affect communication and cohesion in work teams, would reduce the level of socialization and empathy and would turn us into simple robots subscribed to an ATM), or to give up offices (just as the solution to reduce the number of accidents is not to keep cars in the garage, to walk, or to reduce manufacture of new cars).

I think that the structure of the article needs to be rethought a little.

Author Response

The author is grateful to the reviewer for the comments, and he tried to take advantage of them to improve the manuscript quality.
Research method and the objectives of the work have been better explained in the Introduction section, as well as the main contribution to the state-of-art and the actual novelty proposed.
The Conclusion section has been deeply revised and improved. In particular, it has highlighted that the proposed method of thermal load mapping has been applied to a case study and its results can not be applied to all kinds of building. Moreover, the work from home arrangement has been further discussed and contextualized.

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

accept

Author Response

The author would thank the reviewer for the time spent to review the manuscript. 

Reviewer 2 Report

According to me, the current status of the paper can be accepted for publication.

Author Response

The author would thank the reviewer for the time spent to review the manuscript allowing to improve its quality.

Reviewer 4 Report

The author took into account the recommendations received and slightly improved the article proposed for publication.

Still, from my perspective, the most of the problems still persist. For example, the purpose of the work is better explained in the Conclusion section than in Material and Methods section.

Author Response

The author would thank the reviewer for the time spent to review the manuscript and for the further comments.

Despite the author tried to address all the reviewer’s recommendations in the previous revision, the following modifications (shown in bold) have been done to last paragraph of “Methods and building modeling” section:

According to the Introduction section, the proposed thermal load mapping method has been applied to the described office building, whose numerical model has been carried out with the software DesignBuilder, that matches the EnergyPlus engine accuracy and a user-friendly interface [23]. The development of EnergyPlus has been funded by the U.S. Department of Energy [24] and the first version has been released in the early 2000s. Three are the basic components of EnergyPlus: a simulation manager, which handles the whole simulation process, a heat and mass balance simulation module, which is an improved engine based on the former IBLAST, and a building systems simulation module, which controls the interplays between the all the equipment and the heat and mass balance module [35]. The same modeling approach has been applied to commercial buildings in [36]. In the following sections, a parametric analysis involving three low-effort variables, i.e. heating/cooling set-point temperature, infiltration rate and working shift, has been applied to a typical non-residential building in order to investigate the pertinent changes in thermal loads. Moreover, a latter analysis on final and primary energy consumption focused on the comparison of gas boiler and electric heat pump for heating purpose has been proposed.