school children

Considering school students spend up to one third of their day inside classrooms, it’s surprising how few detailed empirical studies have been conducted into how the thermal environment of classrooms affects students’ comfort and performance. Whereas PMV tends to exaggerate warm discomfort for adults, the literature suggests it underestimate children’s actual thermal sensation, but there is no coherent explanation for this in terms of metabolic or other physiological differences to date.

In a great portion of Danish primary schools the mechanical ventilation systems is outdated or simply rely on opening of windows to ventilate the classrooms. This leads to high energy consumption for fans and/or ventilation heat losses and poor indoor environment, as the ventilation systems cannot provide a sufficient ventilation rate. A recent study with 750 Danish classrooms show that 56 % had CO2-concentrations over a 1000 ppm, which is the recommended limit by the Danish working environment authority and this adversely affects the performance and well being of the pupils.