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.

This paper makes the assertion that established concepts from thermal comfort research might be used to develop an adaptive comfort model for lighting. By gathering data from a live office environment, we demonstrate the necessity of dynamically-adapted lighting levels in order to achieve both comfort and energy savings. We detail the background and the experimental setup that is used to extract the light levels at which the occupant switches his lights on.

Transitional spaces are the spaces influenced by the outdoor climate and yet are architecturally bounded by a building envelope. It can be argued that because these spaces are neither fully outside nor inside they create unique environmental conditions that may result in different expectations and perceptions of thermal comfort by those who use them. This paper presents findings from field surveys conducted in two transitional spaces in two different public buildings during the summer in Cardiff, UK.