A study of thermal mavericks in Australia

Abstract

The research presented in this paper was conducted in order to test whether the thermal preferences of occupants in low energy houses are influenced by their environmental values. This was done through a thermal comfort study and Environmental Attitudes Inventory (EAI) of 40 low energy households located within two very different climates, cold temperate and hot humid, in Australia. The results show that the occupants of these dwellings considered conditions comfortable outside of the accepted adaptive thermal comfort limits and suggest that the conditions people find acceptable may be a function of their underlying environmental values. These results suggest that greater acknowledgement of atypical preferences in the mandatory assessment of building thermal performance is needed. The preliminary analysis presented in this paper is of the first six months of data collected in two cohorts of these ‘thermal maverick’ households (full data collection will cover approximately 12 months).