Heating Systems COP

Engineering Inputs: Building System

Patrick Chopson avatar
Written by Patrick Chopson
Updated over a week ago

The Coefficient of Performance is the ratio of useful energy vs the input energy. It describes a systems energy efficiency and relates directly the heating and cooling energy used in a project. Higher COP values are better and will result in less energy, operating cost and operating carbon used by a project.

COP of a heating system is the ratio of useful heat supplied over the work required. A COP of 1 means that all input work is converted to heat. COP above 1 are achieved by heat pumps which use the input work to move heat from a source to a load, instead of straight conversion to heat.

Traditional boilers are typically provided with an efficiency rating, for example 90% efficient. To convert to a COP simply divide by 100, for example our 90% efficient boiler results in a COP of 0.9.

90 / 100 = 0.9

The Heating System COP input is located on the Baseline page, under the Building Systems tab. The default values are populated based the Energy code defined on the Project page. The COP used by the simulation is an average for the year.

Additional information on conversions can be found in this article

Further reading on COP

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