Abstract

Smartphone applications or electronic devices in the form of occupant voting systems (OVS) have demonstrated to be feasible for acquiring feedback from occupants to support the building operation manager to identify indoor environmental quality (IEQ) problems and inappropriate control settings of heating, ventilation and air-conditioning (HVAC). The present paper aims to contribute to the growing research on OVS as a tool to support building operation management. The paper presents a study about a tangible OVS, denoted TiAQ, that occupants could use to vote on their here-and-now experiences regarding the thermal environment and indoor air quality. The main objectives were to identify whether there was an alignment between the votes collected with TiAQ and the monitored IEQ variables as well as to demonstrate the use of occupant votes to identify problematic IEQ conditions and appropriate strategies for HVAC control. The study demonstrated that thermal votes collected with TiAQ could be related to the variations in the indoor temperature and ventilation airflow. Additionally, collected votes could identify i.a. poorly set indoor temperature setpoint and appropriate control strategies that could reduce energy use by 46% and increase thermal comfort and cold complaints by 6% if current airflow and indoor temperature setpoint were lowered.

Highlights

  • Ongoing feedback from occupants about the indoor environment is helpful to assess buildings’ operational performance [1,2]

  • Occupants can directly address the building operation manager about matters related to the indoor environment, submit a complaint using computerised maintenance management systems (CMMS) or answer indoor environmental quality (IEQ) questionnaires [3,4,5]

  • Occupant voting systems (OVS) [15,16] provide an alternative to CMMS and IEQ questionnaires as they are designed as simple tools to collect structured, long-term occupant feedback on specific IEQ aspects

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Summary

Introduction

Ongoing feedback from occupants about the indoor environment is helpful to assess buildings’ operational performance [1,2]. Sporadic and unsolicited feedback from occupants, occupant complaints, is considered by previous research studies (e.g., [4,6]) as less favourable in achieving a proactive approach to building operation management as it is focused on handling the complaint rather than optimising occupants’ satisfaction. Dutta et al [12] demonstrated through four case studies the application of text mining, decision tree and data visualisation techniques to analyse CMMS data to obtain insights into the spatial and temporal characteristics of different complaint categories. They identified, e.g., that most complaints were concentrated round a few floors of a building and that thermal complaints peaked round noon. Occupant voting systems (OVS) [15,16] provide an alternative to CMMS and IEQ questionnaires as they are designed as simple tools to collect structured, long-term occupant feedback on specific IEQ aspects

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