People’s adaptation to thermal conditions inside buildings for religious practice

Abstract

Users of naturally ventilated (NV) buildings often try to adapt to maintain thermal comfort when thermal dissatisfaction is perceived, while this ability seems to be unnecessary for those living in air-conditioned spaces. Such a thermal subjective difference led to an establishment of the adaptive model, which was included in the ASHRAE Standard-55:2004 in 2004, to reflect thermal comfort requirement of NV-building users. Some forms of this American standard was officially adopted by Thai's Rating of Energy and Environmental Sustainability in 2012. However, its suitability for local application has remained questionable, thereby necessitating the need for more field-based research to gain a better understanding of local people's requirement for indoor thermal environments. This field research aimed to investigate users' adaptive thermal comfort using 517 datasets consisting of respondent personal information, subjective votes, and adaptive actions and thermal environmental data of three NV meditation halls in Thailand. The results reveal the inaccuracy of the predicted mean vote method. The respondents' neutral temperatures are higher than their thermal preference. Moreover, the 80% indoor acceptable thermal range in the study was slightly wider compared to a limit suggested by the ASHARE Standard. Regarding thermal adaptations, personal adjustments played a significant role in the first sequence of action, whereas psychological adaptations were more important in the later sequences.