Addressing the Impact of Industrialized Components on the Cost of Temporary Heating in Cold-climate Regions

Abstract

In countries with cold climates such as Canada, the cost of providing space heating during the construction phase, also known as temporary heating, results in a significant additional construction cost, which causes budget deviations thus affecting the project's financial performance. In fact, the estimation of temporary heating is commonly overlooked due to the uncertainties such as weather forecast and the project's actual onsite schedule. The cost of temporary heating comprises two parts: (1) the cost of equipment rental, and (2) the fuel consumption required to heat a given area when the temperature falls below a certain threshold. The fuel consumption of the equipment is related to the temperature and exposure of the building's envelope to the current weather conditions. Thus, the construction of the building envelope is critical to the reduction of fuel consumption and the consequent temporary heating cost of the project. In this context, the research presented in this paper aims to estimate the impacts of temporary heating for various constructive methods, such as the traditional stick-built practice and a few variations of panelized construction (in regard to the insulation used), by developing a simulation model to observe the variation of weather data, construction schedule, and fuel consumption for each scenario. To perform this analysis, a 4-story residential building located in the city of Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, is used as a case study in which the proposed scenarios are compared in order to address the advantages of industrialized components in reducing the cost of temporary heating.