Abstract

A new approach to redefine thermal comfort temperature for cold climatic hilly regions is presented. This approach will lead to the reduction of base temperature, number of winter space heating degree-days required and helps in the designing and proper sizing of space heating systems, and thus reducing the initial high costs of solar passive features. The new thermal comfort temperature has been proposed and used in the passive solar design of a Bank building at Shimla (Latitude 31.1 °N, Longitude 77.1 °E and Altitude 2202m (above msl)) the capital of Himachal Pradesh, the Western Himalayan State in India. The monitoring of building shows that a new thermal comfort temperature results in reducing the heating requirement by about 44%, thereby indicating the need to adopt this approach for cold regions.

Keywords: Thermal comfort temperature; Heating demand; Cold regions; Passive solar building