Loughborough University
Browse

Feedback messaging, thermal comfort and usage of office-based personal comfort systems

Download (2.38 MB)
journal contribution
posted on 2020-02-24, 15:41 authored by Ziqiao Li, Dennis Loveday, Peter DemianPeter Demian
Psychological processes are involved in human thermal comfort evaluation, and play a role in people's judgement of their thermal environment. Could these processes be beneficially managed in some way? This paper reports what is believed to be the first investigation of whether messaging, in the form of energy feedback and social normative information, can affect human subjective thermal comfort-related evaluations. Work was conducted in a controlled environmental room, the context being that of a multi-occupant office with messaging being delivered to individuals via a computer screen on each desk. Investigations were conducted for a range of warm office conditions (24.5 °C, 27 °C, 29.5 °C, as might be encountered in summertime). Experimental sessions of two hours’ duration were undertaken for: no messaging; messaging appearing at the second hour; messaging present at first hour then removed at second hour. A total of 62 subjects (23 female and 39 male) took part, with all (except one) of the thermal conditions that involved messaging being experienced by 9 participants. The appearance of energy feedback and social normative messaging was found to have a statistically-significant effect on reported thermal sensations, reported thermal comfort and reported intended desk fan usage, these being observed at the higher end of the temperature range, but had no effect on other subjective evaluations. Presence, then removal, of messaging showed no significant effects, as did an effective ‘control group’ comparison. Whilst effects were observed on certain subjective thermal evaluations at the higher temperatures, these were at the 95% confidence level, and it is recommended that a larger scale study be undertaken to confirm, or otherwise, these observations. The study offers a method that can be followed for future investigations under controlled conditions, and serves to design further, larger-scale, experiments, to investigate actual usage of personal comfort systems and the role of messaging in this context. Implications of any ‘intervention-type’ influences (of which ‘messaging’ could be an example) on subjective evaluations, if confirmed, may open a new way to help manage human thermal comfort and energy use in offices or similar environments, but this will require further careful consideration, particularly from the perspective of human health and well-being, prior to any deployment in practice.

Funding

Loughborough University, UK

History

School

  • Architecture, Building and Civil Engineering

Published in

Energy and Buildings

Volume

205

Publisher

Elsevier BV

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Rights holder

© Elsevier B.V.

Publisher statement

This paper was accepted for publication in the journal Energy and Buildings and the definitive published version is available at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enbuild.2019.109514.

Acceptance date

2019-10-10

Publication date

2019-10-11

Copyright date

2019

ISSN

0378-7788

Language

  • en

Depositor

Prof Dennis Loveday. Deposit date: 20 February 2020

Article number

109514

Usage metrics

    Loughborough Publications

    Categories

    No categories selected

    Exports

    RefWorks
    BibTeX
    Ref. manager
    Endnote
    DataCite
    NLM
    DC