We consider the time-dependent convection--diffusion--reaction equation. We derive a posteriori error estimates for the discretization of this equation by the cell-centered finite volume scheme in space and a backward Euler scheme in time. The estimates are established in the energy norm and they bound the error between the exact solution and a locally post processed approximate solution, based on H(div,Ω)-conforming diffusive and convective flux reconstructions, as well as an H¹₀(Ω)-conforming potential reconstruction. We propose an adaptive algorithm which ensures the control of the total error with respect to a user-defined relative precision by refining the meshes adaptively while equilibrating the time and space contributions to the error. We also present numerical experiments. Finally, we derive another a posteriori error estimate in the energy norm augmented by a dual norm of the time derivative and the skew symmetric part of the differential operator. The new estimate is robust in convective-dominated regimes and local-in-time and global-in-space lower bounds are also derived
