Automatic vs Manual Control Strategy for Window Blinds and Ceiling Lights: Consequences to Perceived Visual and Thermal Discomfort

Abstract

A case study to evaluate the occupants' satisfaction in relation to two different control strategies (fully automatic and manual) for blind and ceiling lights use in cell offices was carried on in Trondheim, Norway. A group of 11 participants with varying age, gender, and ethnicity, used two test cells of a laboratory as a workspace primarily carrying out office tasks at a personal computer for a total of 19 calendar days. The participants were asked to answer a computer-based questionnaire for reporting their perceived thermal and visual comfort. Concurrently, measurements of the indoor operative temperature, illuminance level, and operation of windows, blinds, and ceiling lights were registered. Results shows that the use of the automatic control strategy led to a higher visual discomfort, which in addition led to a higher thermal discomfort, despite this last not caused by a higher average operative temperature.

Dynamic façades – An exploratory campaign to assess occupant multi-domain environmental satisfaction and façade interaction

“…Automated dynamic façades can be programmed to respond in real time to changes in indoor and outdoor conditions. An effective responsive control of these technologies can reduce energy consumption [1] whilst improving occupant comfort and satisfaction with the indoor environment [2,3]. The effectiveness of façade automated controls depends, however, on occupant interaction and satisfaction with these controls [4][5][6].…”

Test rooms to study human comfort in buildings: A review of controlled experiments and facilities

“…It was not possible to assess whether the test rooms are located inside a building or are entirely independent buildings for 10% of the 187 test rooms identified. According to the available information, only 7% of the facilities are independent buildings, external to any other building [34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44][45][46][47]. Five of these independent test rooms are located on a platform that allows the whole structure to rotate [34][35][36][37]41].…”

“…Eight of the external facilities have just one room, but the possibility to work with movable internal partitions is mentioned for four of them [38,41,43,44]. The other six outdoor test rooms present two rooms, and four out of the six have movable partitions for changing the interior space layout [34,35,40,45]. For the inside test rooms, single room configurations are most common (79%), some of which can be modified through movable interior partitions (19%).…”

“…Among the 14 experimental facilities built outside, only one does not have windows [46]. At the same time, five include an adjustable envelope to vary the window-to-wall ratio (WWR) [35,37,41,43,45], five have a WWR lower than 0.5 [38,39,42,44,47], and three have a WWR in between 0.6 and 0.8 [34,36,40]. Concerning the shading system, it is clearly stated that there are external blinds in three test rooms [34,36,47], four present internal shading systems [38,40,42,44], while just one has both [39].…”

“…Two papers describe a test room facility developed and constructed to test all environmental factors (lighting, acoustics, air, and thermal quality) [43,304], including interactions with the environment through design and systems, making it possible to provide both input data to and output data from the occupants. Most of the publications were concerned with thermal quality in relation to thermal comfort, sensations and/or preferences [102,124,[305][306][307], in combination with (personal) control [36,111,[281][282][283]308,309], together with air quality [232] or visual quality [45,310]. The latter was studied in three reported studies [73,189,191], of which one was concerned with daylight, glare, shading and control [73].…”