Exterior shades energy efficiency for a mixt, office-residential building in Bucharest

This short paper presents the important effect efficient exterior shades have on some results of an 11-summer day period dynamic simulation for a mixt (residential and office) mid-rise building, located in Bucharest. The cooling loads for the shades-on case are strongly reduced requiring a smaller capacity cooling equipment and shorter operation times for it. The exterior shades have an important impact on the first of the two outdoor factors causing high cooling loads in summer (solar radiation incident on the building and outdoor temperature), the solar gains being dramatically decreased. It is suggested that future Romanian building regulations should enforce assessing possible building energy savings provided by shading devices in the building design phase as they can be mounted in almost any situation and the necessary additional investment is not high.