Measuring the impact of occupant behaviour on energy usage in existing homes

Thermal, visual, and acoustic comfort and air quality in buildings have a significant effect on occupant performance, productivity and satisfaction. Most importantly, earlier research has found that maintaining thermal comfort can make heavy demands on building energy usage in dwellings. Those trends are leading to even greater increases in energy demand and CO2 emissions that create a vicious cycle. In the real world, human indoor thermal comfort is influenced by complexities of past comfort history, technical practices and culture. There is a need to review of existing research and achievements. It provides great benefits to identify future research directions. For this reason, this research presents the results of an extensive literature review on previous studies on different topics of indoor comfort and human behavioural response in the built environment. This study is focused on monitoring and measuring energy consumption and physical environment in dwellings to test various methods that can capture how occupants control their indoor built environment at what cost of energy. Eight dwellings have been selected and the occupants have participated this study. Their thermal comfort, energy consumption, indoor and local outdoor physical conditions have been monitored by mixed methodologies at detailed level. Due to the level of disaggregated information, the number of dwellings was limited and the data can only represent the participating occupants, but the validation of monitoring methodologies has provided valuable overview regarding a range of methods instrumentations for measuring various parameters that could be used different levels of detailed domestic energy consumption and thermal environment information