Experiment and Simulation-Based Study of Energy Efficiency of Green Façade Retrofit of Existing Buildings in Rural Northern China

As China’s urbanisation continues, the building area is expanding, of which the occupancy of rural residential buildings is also very large. However, most rural dwellings lack insulating structures and have poor thermal performance. This paper verifies and analyses the energy-saving potential of green façades for rural houses in northern China through comparative experiments as well as software simulations. The experiments were conducted from July to August 2024 to verify the reliability of the software simulations. And the simulation was carried out on an existing house in rural northern China. The experimental results show that the reference room consumes 1.84 times more electricity than the vertical greenery room, and the vertical greenery achieves a good energy saving of 45.75%. According to the simulated data, the building energy efficiency of rural houses in northern China after green façade retrofitting is obvious, the energy-saving rate reaches 14.94%, and 713.32 KWh of electricity can be saved in the whole cooling period.