The occupation profile of the house varied on a weekly and annual basis so as to reflect the behavior of a typical southern european family. A schedule with variable internal temperature setpoints was adopted. The heating period was set between 1st of October and 15th of April and the cooling period between 15th April and 30th September. The entrance hall and restrooms are equipped with 100W heater, see Table 1.

2.1 Effect of Building Orientation

Depending on the orientation of the house different heating and cooling demands are obtained. Since it is not always possible to build a south facing house (where the sum of the heating and cooling needs is lower), we used a heating and cooling demand that is the average value for a set of eighteen possible orientations (see Figure 1). The yearly heating and cooling demand are 14.9 kWh/m2 and 1.8 kWh/m2 respectively.

2.2 Domestic Hot Water (DHW)

We estimated a daily consumption of 70 l/person at 45°C., using a constant water supply yearly average temperature of 15°C, the yearly energy demand for DHW is 33.3 kWh/m2. For an optimized house in the Lisbon climate DHW is two times larger than space heating demand.