A toolkit for low-cost thermal comfort sensing

Abstract

Why is it that we can have standards on how to achieve comfort [5] and advanced building control systems to implement these standards, yet water cooler 'discussions' about how hot, cold, or generally uncomfortable it is, seem to form a backbone to modern office life [8]? In the UK, domestic space and water heating alone was approximately 80% of the country's total final energy in 2017 [9]. Through our heating and cooling infrastructures, we are consuming significant amounts of energy and pumping out growing amounts of carbon, only to achieve a state of further discontentment. Are we approaching this all wrong? To reduce our consumption significantly, we need new methods of understanding and achieving thermal comfort. To help achieve these new methods, this paper argues we need to look again at how we are currently collecting thermal comfort data.