English

Increasing personal comfort by heating office building occupants locally means that the lower setpoint for space heating. Less energy will be used when the total energy demand from all individual comfort systems together is lower than the energy saved by lowering the setpoint. The energy saving potential is dependent on the specific characteristics of the individual heating. The important performance characteristics are the energy used per unit of mitigated discomfort and the maximum discomfort that can be compensated for.

Floor heating is characterized by small horizontal and vertical temperature differences, and might be especially suitable for Japanese homes where it is customary to sit on the floor. This paper compares thermal comfort in homes while floor heating systems and air conditioning systems were in use during winter. Each dwelling had both a floor heating system and an air conditioning system, each used on alternate weeks during the survey period.  Throughout the survey periods residents were asked about their current thermal sensation, thermal preference, overall comfort and foot-comfort.

Rehva Guide No 6 – Indoor Climate and Productivity in Offices - states as its main purpose to establish quantitative relationships of indoor environmental aspects with performance and sickness absenteeism. The following relationships were established: temperature with performance, ventilation with performance, perceived indoor air quality with performance and ventilation with sickness absenteeism.

This paper evaluates the adaptive method application proposed by the last version of ASHRAE 55 (2013) standard in two different climates in Brazil. ASHRAE 55 (2013) currently allows for linear and exponential methods to calculate the prevailing mean outdoor air temperature (Tpma(out)) and both are used to establish the acceptability zones. For the exponential method, two different α were used (0.6 and 0.8). Moreover, the Tpma(out) was calculated for two different time spans (7 and 30 days).

In 2004 the first adaptive thermal comfort guideline was introduced in the Netherlands. Recently a new, upgraded version of this ISSO 74 (ATG) guideline has been developed. The new requirements are hybrid in nature as the 2014 version of the guideline combines elements of traditional non-adaptive comfort standards with elements of adaptive standards. This paper describes the new guideline and explains the rationale behind it. Also changes in comparison with the original 2004 version and issues related to performance verification are discussed.

This paper investigates the effect of occupant behaviour and expectations on energy use and indoor environmental conditions of six case study dwellings in three sustainable social housing developments in UK using building performance evaluation methods. The case study houses cover a variety of built forms and different types of construction systems but have similar occupancy profiles and tenures.

Thermal comfort studies have been performed so far either in closed climate chambers with controlled conditions or non-controlled conditions during field studies. Detailed analyses of mechanisms behind the adaptive comfort models are therefore hardly possible. This paper presents a newly constructed climate chamber in Karlsruhe (Germany) along with the complete chain from subjective experiments, via data analyses, model development and implementation into dynamic building energy simulation until the formation of a decision base for or against a renovation measure for a confined case.

This draft paper was developed as a stalking horse for the Windsor 2014 Conference workshop on Statistics, It presents the results of summer time field work undertaken by Abdulrahman Alsheikh in the region of Damman, Saudi Arabia and the data collected shows that middle class homes families there occasionally report thermal neutrality at very high temperatures and humidities.

Daylighting is still the most energy efficient lighting strategy, but filtering sunlight might conflict with maximization of solar gains in winter or reducing solar heat gain in summer. In passive solar homes occupants ideally balance visual and thermal comfort. This study explores the relationship of daylight and thermal comfort in a passive solar home using an extended case study method.

It is common knowledge that occupants’ behaviour on building control systems plays a significant role to achieve comfortable indoor environmental conditions. Moreover, different research studies have shown how occupants’ behaviour also has a huge influence on energy consumption. Consequently, since the building sector still consumes nearly half of the total amount of energy used in Europe and because occupants’ comfort should be one of the major aim of a building construction, this influential factor should be further investigated.