FORCES: feedback and control for occupants to refine comfort and energy savings

Abstract

Humans spend 90% of their lives inside buildings, but often the Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning (HVAC) systems of commercial buildings do not properly maintain occupant comfort. Use of feedback through comfort voting applications has been shown to improve the quality of service, but the effects of application feedback and user interface design has not been investigated. In this work, we present several methods of feedback that use data presentation and environmental interaction in comfort voting applications. Through a 40 week user study of 61 University employees across 3 buildings, we show that feedback systems can be used to increase user satisfaction with thermal conditions from 33.9% to 93.3% and reduce energy consumption up to 18.99% compared to a system without voting. In addition, we find that by including a drifting control strategy, we find energy savings up to 37% can be realized without a significant reduction in satisfaction.