Adaptive Comfort
You need to know what range of temperature you are likely to find comfortable when you are planning a house or its heating and cooling. This graph is a guide to the temperature range for comfort. (It has been posted here before, but the image is lost.)
The graph explains itself. People are comfortable at rather higher temperatures in places, or at times of year, when the climate is warmer. They are comfortable at lower temperatures if the climate is cooler.
For any month in any place, you must simply look up the mean temperature for that month. Then 90% of all people will feel comfortable at temperatures in the five-degree range between the magenta line and the green line. At temperatures in the seven-degree range between the orange and blue lines, 80% of people will feel comfortable.
Generally, using the local mean temperatures for January and July will give enough information for your planning. Sydney provides an example:
Because the Sydney mean temperature in July is 13°, 80% of people will remain comfortable if a house gets no colder than 18°.
Because the Sydney mean temperature in January is 23°, 80% of people will remain comfortable if a house gets no hotter than 29°.
A house that maintains comfort
The graph below shows how a solar-passive house maintained comfort for the whole year, despite a climate where winter mean temperature approaches zero. Quite often, indoor temperatures were near the lower limit of the Adaptive Comfort Standard. (Hourly indoor temperatures also varied much more than the weekly averages shown.)
https://climatebysurly.com/2011/07/20/one-year-of-house-performance-i/
The adaptive comfort Zone shown on the first graph was proposed by Richard de Dear and Gail Schiller Brager (2001).
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs004840100093
This adaptive comfort zone has been incorporated in the de facto international standard: ANSI/ASHRAE Standard 55-2004, Section 5.3,, as summarised here:
http://escholarship.org/uc/item/2m34683k#page-1
By this innovation, the American Society of Heating, Refrigeration, and Air-conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) recognised publicly that full climate control of buildings at one "ideal" temperature and humidity may not be the way of the future.
Posted Sunday 23 Jul 2017 @ 4:19:20 am from IP
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