Households

Location: Portugal

Description:

Characteristics of building

In Demo 4, single-family houses with reduced area whose owners are prosumer members of Coopérnico will be selected. The houses are in different regions of Portugal (north, center, south, coast and interior) and two cities: Lisbon and Oporto. The selected houses are aged 15 years or more and preferably that have not benefited from energy efficiency renovations.

Characteristics of renovation need

Portugal has 10 million people. Until 1990, buildings were built without minimum requirements.

Most of the Portuguese residential buildings are mostly built in reinforced concrete structure (slabs, pillars and beams) and walls in masonry of ceramic brick, solid or hollowed, laid with cement mortar and plastered with cement. It is also very likely to find houses built in carved or ordinary stone masonry with an interior structure in wood and partitioned wood, plastered and stuccoed.

Also, there is a high percentage of buildings that were built before 1960 which were not renovated. This fact is more aggravated in densely populated areas, like high and low Alentejo.

In terms of heating devices in the houses, it is mostly divided between mobile or fixed appliances. In the fixed ones, the most used are fireplaces and recovering heat appliances, representing 26,6% and 10,7% each of the houses that have fixe appliances. In the interior areas of the country it is more likely to find houses with fireplaces, while in coastal areas like Lisbon and Oporto have more mobile appliances. By 2011, most of the residential houses used electricity as heating source, while the other 50%, 34% used wood and coal. The remaining percentage used gaseous or liquid fuel.

Portugal has an extensive coastline, which brings a lot of humility to the houses. This is even worse as there is lack of adequate ventilation system in the houses, and creates the surge of mould. This brings a lot of health problems to the residents of the houses.

There was a period between 1990 and 2005 when there were requirements to prevent pathologies and then in 2006 the law of requirements for energy efficiency and energy certificates came into force. Of the 2,100,000 energy certificates issued, 67% of the buildings have an energy class C or lower.

The Recovery and Resilience Plan includes financing to improve the energy efficiency of residential buildings, through the Casas+Eficientes Program. 82,000 applications have been submitted so far and of these more than 22,000 have already received the money. For example, 35% of renovations involved replacing windows and 25% installing heat pumps.

Target Groups:

The target groups are made up of prosumer members of Coopérnico, living in a single-family building, prevailing to be a Coopérnico customer. Only people who allow the monitoring of energy consumption, before and after the renovation of their homes, will be accepted.