UK Dwelling Overheating Temperatures and Comfort Criteria Under Climate Change

More frequent hot summers in the UK under Climate Change could lead to increased discomfort conditions in buildings as well as increasing installation of air-conditioning (AC) systems. As a result, more installation of the AC systems could lead to increased energy use for air-conditioning and carbon emissions caused by power plants generating electricity for cooling in buildings and again running such systems. When predicting the future energy consumption and carbon emissions from the buildings under Climate Change, one could consider current thermal comfort standards (i.e. comfort temperature bands) for calculations. Therefore, the energy consumption for buildings adapted Climate Change could be easily overestimated with the use of current thermal comfort standards in order to predict future energy consumption and carbon emissions. Nevertheless there is so little published about discomfort conditions concerning overheating temperature limits during summer condition in buildings (particularly in dwellings) using future climatic data or even energy consumption for cooling. The paper defines comfortable conditions and the range of acceptable temperature bands in free-running buildings. For generating the upper limits of temperatures of free-running buildings’ under UKCIP02’s ‘High emissions scenario’ future climate in UK, two different calculation methods were considered such as running mean outdoor temperature (European Standard EN1525, CIBSE) and mean monthly outdoor temperature (ASHARE 55-2004) to determine the temperature limits. The differences between the adaptive comfort bands in EN15251 and ASHRAE 55-2004 which means how the indoor comfort conditions were related to the running mean of the outdoor temperature by daily and by monthly, have been further discussed in the paper. As a result of the calculations and simulations, the dwellings’ (free-running buildings) upper limits of temperature were defined. Under UKCIP02’s high emissions scenario, 2020, 2050 and 2080 climate for the north east of England (Leeds) was generated and for the upper limit of the temperatures of each was discussed within this paper.