Abstract
Many public social housing building stocks were constructed before the introduction of national thermal regulations, and, as a result, in some situations, energy poverty conditioning during severe winter seasons results in little to no heating habits involving active systems in order to improve building thermal performances. Besides rigorous summer seasons, climate change predictions also indicate rigorous winter seasons will occur that will prevail in some Iberia Peninsula locations, worsening this scenario for this Southern European region. Among others, understanding the extension of discomfort in social housing buildings during heating seasons is therefore essential so as to perceive the suitability of the building stock to deal with present and future climate scenarios. Thus, this article presents a thermal comfort assessment during a winter season period applied to two social housing dwellings located in Covilhã, Portugal, inhabited by elderly residents, under realistic heating habits. An experimental campaign was performed and the results show that discomfort was found to be extremely significant for the majority of the occupied time. Passive means alone and resident heating habits were not enough to achieve proper indoor thermal and humidity conditions, resulting in important losses of well-being to the risk group of the elderly.
Highlights
Economic conditioning had a significant impact on the use of active systems—both residents only used portable fan heaters for some time periods—with an increase in clothing thermal insulation being the common strategy to work around this limitation, with no specific health problems demanding particular thermal conditions mentioned
It is noticeable that the range between 10 °C and 12 °C represents more than 40% of the temperature frequency, other close ranges represent a considerable amount of frequency as a whole
The goal of this research was to assess indoor thermohygrometric conditions in a public social housing case study located in the Beira Interior region during winter season, so as to provide an understanding of indoor performance suitability for present and predicted climate scenarios
Summary
Among other definitions [2], energy poverty is defined as the inability of family units to pay energy bills and maintain comfortable indoor living standards The repercussion of this phenomenon in Europe affects 50 to 125 million people, and is regarded by the European Commission as an urgent, but complex issue to solve, considering the interaction between diverse energy, social, and economic contexts [3,4]. Portugal is ranked as one of the worst countries regarding important indicators like electricity/gas prices for the residential sector and the feasibility to obtain comfortable indoor thermal conditions in summer and winter seasons [8] This is because Portuguese family units present a median disposable income that is 39% lower than the European Union average, its gas and electricity prices are some of the highest [7]. Some national strategies are already being implemented to deal with this problem, such as the National Energy and Climate Plan [10], which aims to properly perform a diagnosis and characterization of the existing limitations, as well as establish monitoring indicators and national, regional, and local objectives
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