The assessment of integrated multi-energy systems in buildings may require the knowledge of the energy use for building space heating and cooling with a temporal precision of at least 1 h. To assist the overall system optimisation, a parameter estimation procedure, which allows to restore the hourly space heating and cooling loads from the monthly energy consumption is here presented. The innovative aspect of the suggested approach lies in the possibility offered by a steady-state inverse modelling procedure to restore the short term heating and cooling loads of a building by using as input aggregated energy consumption data and the short term behaviour of the climatic variables. The effectiveness of the procedure, based on a non-linear multivariate regression approach, has been assessed with synthetic data calculated by means of the TRNSYS 16 software. Climatic data from Meteonorm assisted the simulations for four European locations. Wall construction, glazing portion, internal both sensible and latent heat gain, air change rate, time scheduling of plant operation have been considered. The hourly space heating or cooling loads were restored with a coefficient of determination included between 0.74 and 0.96. The satisfactory results obtained suggest that the estimation procedure can be extended to restore the hourly energy use for space heating and cooling from the utility bills of existing buildings. (c) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.