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.

The relationship between urban growth and the formation of urban heat islands, i.e. climatic differences between the urban area and adjacent rural areas, is discussed by several authors and is assumed to be ubiquitous for various climatic regions. Curitiba (25.5ºS), located within a region of subtropical climate in elevation, boasts a population growth rate of approximately 2% a year. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the effect of the urban agglomeration on microclimate changes.

In order to clarify the outdoor thermal comfort and clothing, the thermal measurements (air temperature) and thermal comfort survey were conducted in Hachiko Square which is located in the Shibuya station, Tokyo. (Hachiko is a famous statue of a dog which is a popular meeting place.) The survey was conducted every two weeks and the number of people investigated was 224.  The results showed that the average clothing insulation of the females is greater than that of the men. The clothing insulation is highly correlated with the outdoor air temperature.

Though wider diversities of environmental attributes are intrinsic in water fringed urban parks, these parks are less represented in the previous studies. Thus the study aims to explore the impact of environmental attributes of settings on user perceived controls for enhancing daytime thermal acceptability of water fringed urban parks in Colombo, Sri Lanka. The study investigated seven diversified settings which demonstrate varying shading levels and environmental attributes with visual integration of water surfaces.