Thermal Comfort Characteristics of Traditional Buildings in Indonesia

Abstract

Originally, traditional houses in Indonesia were designed according to the rural environment, which had the maximum natural ventilation and minimum building heat gain. Currently, the occupant population and building growth are the major factors affecting the thermal comfort. This study evaluated the building thermal performance, occupant perception, factor of thermal environment in traditional tropical buildings of Indonesia and occupant adaptation way in the changing environment. The number of surviving traditional buildings were 19 objects as the representative numbers both lowland and upland areas with 71 occupants as the respondents. The multi-functions environment tester was set in the occupant reference height and used to obtain simultaneously environmental condition. The results showed that in a traditional tropical building, the occupants prefer the wind speed as thermal comfort indicator. In general, the sex and age have no significant factor. In both lowland and upland, neutral temperature is 29.3℃ and wind speed is 0.6 ㎧ while lowland neutral relative humidity is 69.6% and upland is 63.9%. Climate, building density and building dimension have the largest effect on their thermal condition when in addition to personal adjustments, active ventilation and passive methods are used as adaptation methods in lowland and upland areas, respectively.