The influence of building material, windows and insulators on energy saving in different climate zones in Iran

One of the most influential factors in measuring the annual energy consumption and dissipation of buildings is heat transfer that occurs between indoor and outdoor of the building areas. In this research, we use The DesignBuilder software to estimate the monthly annual rate of energy consumption to supply the building’s cooling and heating with respect to the type of used walls. This study estimates the load in different walls to compare the effect of the type of walls in terms of heat transfer in buildings in different cities of Iran, namely Tehran, Tabriz, Bandar Abbas, and Mashhad. In addition, the effect of using different insulators and windows on annual energy consumption is calculated. Results demonstrate that the polyurethane metal is the optimum insulator as it reduces the annual energy consumption the most in Tabriz and Mashhad by 11% and 10% and quite less in Bandar Abbas by 7.8%, while the annual energy consumption using expanded polystyrene is the least in all cities. In addition, the results show that the least energy consumption for the four climates is related to wall type 1 (insulated concrete block with brick façade) and the most energy consumption to wall type 7 (normal brick with stone façade). The most significant effect of using double-walled windows is with UPVC Profiles compared to the use of single-walled ones in Mashhad and Tabriz with 26% reduction in the window’s loads, while the least significant is Bandar Abbas and Tehran with 21%.