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Energy retrofitting of existing residential buildings has a great potential to achieve a sustainable future. One important way to reach this potential is to understand homeowners’ retrofit behaviors due to their crucial roles in retrofit adoption and retrofit effects. Despite many attempts, researchers and governments still know less about the holistic profile of homeowners’ retrofit behaviors, which brought little success in trigging renovation activities and achieving expected retrofit effects. This study tries to fill this research gap by a comprehensive review of the body of existing research. A keyword-based scientometric analysis was performed based on a set of 152 journal articles. By further refining keywords, main research domains pertaining to investment-decision-energy behaviors, policy instruments, retrofit types, construction & services, and methods & methodologies were mapped to show relevant research knowledge and research topics. Based on these research results, a further integrated framework was developed, which explains homeowners’ retrofit behaviors in a systematic way of cross-disciplinary knowledge interactions. Furthermore, implications for retrofit policies in existing buildings were provided. This study is useful for facilitating future research to deepen homeowners’ retrofit behaviors, and also provides valuable references for policy makers to successfully promote home energy retrofit.

Poor thermal comfort of indoor and low efficiency of heating system can always be found in the buildings with large energy consumption. This paper adopted a comparison method to carry on the energy consumption analysis of several control and operation regulation modes of heat metering heating system. A demonstration project in Tianjin was selected as an example to calculate the energy consumption of circulating water pumps of the secondary pipe network in different combinations of control and regulation, and carries on the comparative analysis. It is concluded that circulating water pumps will be the lowest energy consumption under the remote constant pressure control. And it points out the major problems existing in current, which is beneficial for scholars’ further study on heat metering system.

This article analyzed several aspects of the present residential buildings in China's northern heating region such as the indoor thermal environment, satisfaction degree of residents, willingness and motives for retrofit, retrofit content and retrofit effect based on a questionnaire survey. The results revealed poor indoor thermal quality and dissatisfaction of residents, and intensive willingness and obvious retrofit effects. By further clarifying the requirement and the key points of the retrofit, suggestions for promoting the retrofit of the present residential buildings in China's northern heating region were put forward.