A traditional Chinese heating system the Chinese Kang is used by 175 million people in detached houses in the rural regions of China especially in Northeast China This system utilizes biomass such as corn stalks straw corncob and energy plants as the heat sources The objective of this paper is to establish a set of models to simulate the energy performance of the Kang heating system in one Chinese detached house An experimental field study was carried out to collect practical parameters in a newly constructed Chinese detached house The dynamic performance of the Kang heating system was simulated by using IDA-ICE 40 embedded with an empirical model built in the field study The results show that the simulation can obtain good overall agreement with the field measurement results It was confirmed that the Kang model created by IDA-ICE 40 is capable of simulating the performance of the Kang system and of calculating energy consumption in the detached house Moreover the result reveals that the thermal environment in the present Chinese detached house is still poor during the severe cold season if only the Kang system is used to heat the whole house (C) 2010 Elsevier B V All rights reserved