This paper describes the pattern of electricity consumption from total and selected domestic appliances at a typical terrace house in Malaysia. The measured appliances can be classified into four groups on the basis of pattern of use which are ‘standby’ (TV), ‘active’ (massage chair, charger of hand phone, laptop and power bank, washing machine, air-conditioners, iron, standing fan, shower heaters, rice cooker, toaster, microwave), ‘cold’ (refrigerator) and ‘cold and hot’ (water dispenser). The major contribution of monthly electricity consumption comes from ‘cold’ appliances that consume 118.8 kWh/month followed by ‘active’ appliances that consume 87.8 kWh/month and ‘cold and hot’ appliance with 52.5 kWh/month. ‘Standby’ appliances shown a small contribution to the total electricity with 0.9 kWh/month. The amount of energy consumed depends on time-of-use, power characteristics of particular appliances as well as occupancy period.
Residential buildings instigate a vital role in creating a safe and comfortable indoor living environment. The phenomenon of overheating, an impact of climate change, can cause a negative effect on residents’ productiveness and heat-related illnesses and can even force high pressure on electricity generation by increasing the risk of power outages due to excessive peak cooling and heating requirements. Various issues on building thermal comfort are being evolved and discussed in review articles. However, there are few articles that review the current condition of adaptive thermal comfort studies and the potential for energy savings in residential buildings. Therefore, the aims for this paper are to: identify comfort temperature ranges in residential buildings, investigate the correlation of comfort temperature with indoor and outdoor temperatures with the aid of ‘comfort threads’, and clarify the effect of adaptive measures on residential energy saving potential. This study obtained a large variation of residential comfort temperatures, which mostly depend on the climate and operation modes of the building. ‘Comfort threads’ explains that people are adapting to a large variation of indoor and outdoor temperatures and the wide range of comfort temperature could provide significant energy savings in residential buildings. This review provides insight on and an overview of thermal comfort field studies in residential buildings.
Thermal comfort and sensation for each person might be different and varies despite being exposed to the same indoor environment due to the differences of their physiological factors such as gender and age. Thus, it is more challenging to provide suitable thermal environment that can satisfy each individual in the building or in the same dwelling. However, only a few studies pursue and focus on investigating the effect of physiological factors on individual thermal comfort perception. A field measurement was conducted in a condominium from September 2015 until October 2016. The measured indoor air environment in each 46 selected dwellings and 17,026 votes from thermal comfort survey for each individual person involved were collected. Therefore, this study aims to examine the variation of indoor thermal environment and determine the factors for the differences in individual thermal comfort. Hence, we categorized the individual from all selected dwellings into several groups depending on the gender and age. The results showed that there is a variation of comfort indoor air temperatures. Thus, these results can be important in designing guideline for each type of building as different user groups most likely to have different expectation regarding indoor thermal environment.
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