Assessment of the indoor thermal quality: methodology and application

In the last years, the general request for a high quality of life in indoor environments has gradually increased, also because of the elevated percentage of time (often more than 90%) that we spend indoors, so the need to maintain indoor comfort conditions and to improve, at the same time, the energy efficiency is a very topical subject. The indoor environmental quality (IEQ) strongly influences the well-being and the productivity in office and school buildings and the related energy costs. The evaluation of the IEQ has an important role, complementary to the evaluation/certification of the building energy quality. In particular, thermal parameters have a fundamental impact on the perceived IEQ and on energy consumptions in buildings. This chapter is focused on the thermal quality assessment of indoor environments; however, the procedure can be extended and applied to other aspects of the IEQ. A methodology based on a long-term auditing of the thermal quality in existing buildings is presented and discussed, analysing both diagnosis and classification aspects. The approach bases on the application of synthetic indices for the judgement of the thermal status. The long-term analysis of existing buildings is performed by monitoring the thermal environment continuously for a prolonged period of observation, in representative rooms of the building. One or more locations in each room can be monitored, corresponding to the positions of occupants or representing the most frequently occupied zones. The procedure is applied to a case study office building: the in field application highlights the opportunity to determine the thermal quality category of single rooms and of the whole building. Moreover, the long-term approach is extended to the analysis of the thermal quality in museums, where the goal is the conservation of the works of art and where the need to observe the status and variations of the environmental parameters over time is of primary importance.