Post-Occupancy Evaluation of a Cost-effective Bioclimatic Building Chamber: a diagnosis of thermal and acoustic perception of the built environment

Abstract

The Cost-effective Bioclimatic Building Chamber (CBBC) is a laboratory dedicated to comparative studies on environmental comfort and building performance. In this paper, a diagnosis of thermo-acoustic comfort conditions provided by CBBC’s original configuration is presented, based on some results from a Post-Occupancy Evaluation (POE) - which also included lighting, ergonomic, and functional comfort aspects. Firstly, a brief contextualisation of POE is presented. Regarding research procedures, the paper describes CBBC’s structure and functionalities, environmental parameters monitoring, CBBC’s operation protocol, and POE’s methodology. Subsequently, the results of the first POE application are discussed, accomplished by 136 volunteers in August 2018, under forced ventilated conditions without active air conditioning. Most occupants reported thermal comfort at CBBC (84,6%). On the other hand, more than one fifth of the occupants declared dissatisfaction (19,1%) or high dissatisfaction (2,2%) with the CBBC’s noise level.

Keywords:
Indoor comfort; Building performance; Climate chamber