COMFORT COMPLAINTS IN OFFICE BUILDINGS LESSONS LEARNT FROM TWO CASE STUDIES

Air conditioning in offices has become current practice in North Western Europe. Main reasons are thehigh internal loads and solar gains. That move away from the heated, naturally ventilated cellularoffice increased comfort complaints.Two cases are presented, confronting enquiry results with measurements. In both, the enquiries gavea number of dissatisfied at the noted mean vote much higher than the standard PMV/PPD curvesuggests. Measurements in turn showed that only in one of the two case complaints could beexpected. A relationship between the severity of the complaints and the measured data was nottraceable. To explain these results, several hypotheses were forwarded. The thermal environment inlarge landscape offices for example is not uniform. Different people also interpret thermal sensation ona scale from -3 to +3 differently. That has an impact on the number of dissatisfied. Further-on, thestandard curve results from thousands of comfort tests, while on site inquiries concern smallernumbers of people, which expect improvement from the comfort study. For that reason they mayexaggerate when enquired. And, finally, alternative PMV versus PPD curves, published in literature,show more people complaining at a given predicted mean vote than the standard curve suggests.