Historic Buildings and Energy Efficiency

This paper aims to critically examine the issue of rendering historic buildings effi cient. Although this subject has been discussed to some extent the national and international levels, it largely has been under-theorised the existing literature focuses mainly on technical matters related to the of energy performance. Indeed, one of the main issues which not been thoroughly addressed in the literature is balancing conservation on the one hand and improved energy performance of historic on the other, partly due to improper analytical tools, methods, and that are commonly used to classify the energy behaviour of historic . It is the matter of insuffi cient existing tools which triggered development of this paper. This paper is based on experimental measurements order to determine the most relevant parameters and the average -physical data of the historic building envelope. The experiments followed by evaluation of the energy performance of three listed in Italy using static (used for energy certifi cation in Italy), semidynamic, dynamic computer simulations, in order to understand which audit schemes best simulate the actual energy performance of buildings while identifying the strengths and limitations of each type software. The simulations were carried out using experimental data the thermo-physical parameters of the building envelope components, bills, temperature, and relative humidity of air. The ultimate goal to defi ne the appropriate intervention for ‘particular’ types of historic , in order to optimise the energy-effi ciency requirements along with of their inherent cultural values.