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Zhalantun city is located in a severely cold region of China. The cold climate and long winter bring challenges to the energy-saving design of rural dwellings in this area, while the poor economic conditions restrict the application of energy-saving technology. This paper aims to propose an optimal combination of passive design parameters by investigating, testing, and analyzing simulations of Zhalantun rural dwellings, which have a particular architectural pattern. Field measurements during winter show that the indoor temperature of a traditional house is low and fluctuates greatly, and the inner surface is prone to easy condensation. Through thermal comfort surveys, neutral and acceptable temperature ranges were obtained to provide indoor calculation parameters for an energy-saving design. Numerical simulations of heating energy consumption were conducted on the typical building models using DesignBuilder. The influence of different design factors on energy consumption was evaluated. Orthogonal experiments were designed to optimize a series of design parameter combinations to reduce the energy consumption of Zhalantun rural houses and to determine the sequence and significance of the effect of these design factors on energy consumption. Results show that the optimal parameter combination based on orthogonal experiments can obviously reduce energy consumption and have better economic benefits without considering mechanical methods. This can provide a basis for improved energy-saving designs and indoor thermal environments in such rural dwellings.

The purpose of energy-saving retrofit of rural dwellings is to obtain a more comfortable indoor thermal environment with reasonable investment. The utilization rate of heating and air conditioning equipment for dwellings in poor rural areas is very low, and the buildings operate in natural ventilation mode all year round. Since the existing research on energy-saving retrofit is aimed at air-conditioned buildings, the research methods and results are not applicable to rural dwellings. This paper proposes a set of energy-saving retrofit evaluation methods suitable for natural ventilation buildings and applies it to the research on energy-saving retrofit of rural dwellings in cold climate regions of China. The specific process is as follows: First, this paper analyzed the current situation using field research and established a typical building model. Second, the DesignBuilder software was used to simulate all 725 schemes. Subsequently, the three main retrofit measures (replacing the external insulation windows, setting the external wall insulation layer and setting the roof insulation layer) were analyzed separately, and the optimal parameters of each retrofit measure were obtained. Finally, the entropy weight method was used to perform a multi-objective optimization analysis on all retrofit plans. The results show that 6+12A+6-mm insulating glass windows + 50-mm external wall insulation + 90-mm roof insulation is the optimal energy-saving reconstruction scheme. Compared with the benchmark building, the energy-saving rate of the optimal scheme is increased by 23.81%, and the annual adaptive thermal discomfort degree-hours are decreased by 13.17%.