Abstract
Climate change is an important issue that affects energy consumption, causes health problems, such as heat stroke, and requires urgent countermeasures. Serious health problems, including cardiac arrest, often occur in winter in traditional residences in Japan. Cooling-heating energy is required to maintain a healthy thermal environment. Although energy efficiency standards for buildings have been introduced worldwide to reduce energy consumption and various passive energy-saving methods are being investigated, traditional residences still face difficulties in conducting renovations because of various restrictions, such as the conservation of historical or aesthetic values. In this study, these issues and their appropriate countermeasures were investigated for a traditional townhouse in Kyoto, Japan, “Kyo-machiya” (including its new form “Heisei-no-Kyo-machiya”). The potential of reducing heating and cooling loads was examined by conducting numerical analysis considering residents’ lifestyles. Field surveys of the indoor environment were conducted in both summer and winter. It was revealed that by optimizing the times and positions of opening and closing the windows and indoor partitions, the indoor air flow could be adjusted from both thermal comfort (cooling in summer) and discomfort (cold drafts in winter) perspectives, leading to improving the indoor environment without using energy.
Highlights
IntroductionOverheating in dwellings in summer, especially in urban areas, has a considerable influence on our daily lives and health and can result in heat strokes on hot and sunny days, as examined by Hamdy [1], Santamouris [2], and Taylor [3]
Climate change is a crucial issue that requires urgent countermeasures
Based evaluation procedure of the next-generation energy efficiency standards, Basedon onthe the evaluation procedure of the the next-generation energy efficiency standBased on the evaluation procedure of next-generation energy efficiency standheating-cooling loads in the case of the current model residence and of no insulation ards,heating-cooling heating-coolingloads loadsin inthe thecase caseof ofthe thecurrent currentmodel modelresidence residenceand andof ofno noinsulation insulation ards, were calculated
Summary
Overheating in dwellings in summer, especially in urban areas, has a considerable influence on our daily lives and health and can result in heat strokes on hot and sunny days, as examined by Hamdy [1], Santamouris [2], and Taylor [3]. The cooling of buildings results in increasing energy consumption [4] and worsening of the urban environment caused by waste heat from air-conditioning (AC) systems [5]. Health problems, such as cardiac arrest, often occur in winter, especially in dwellings with poor thermal insulation [6,7]. In Japan, one of the causes of these health problems is the habit of bathing in hot water in cold bathrooms
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