This paper offers a guide for the design of water-based embedded heating/cooling systems to promote the use of renewable energy sources and provide a method for actively integrating the building mass to reduce peak loads, transfer heating/cooling loads to off-peak times, and decrease system size.

Peak loads can be reduced by activating the building mass using pipes embedded in the main concrete structure of the building—a thermo-active building system (TABS). For these types of systems, the steady-state calculation of heating and cooling capacity is not sufficient to evaluate the cooling capacity in practice. The dynamic behavior can be evaluated by full dynamic computer simulations of buildings with systems. This is, however, often regarded as too complicated and takes too much time in the design phase.

Units: Dual