Indoor Climate Monitoring

Indoor measurements are highly relevant for recording the real heat stress in buildings. For several reference buildings (residential and non-residential), data loggers were set up at the IOER for an entire summer in selected rooms, which measure air temperature, humidity and carbon dioxide concentration with time resolution (at least ½ hour as a measurement interval). The latter is mainly used to record ventilation behaviour and indoor air quality.

These measurements can be used to check how often and to what extent acceptable limit values, e.g. for indoor temperatures above 26°C, are exceeded and thus to quantify how strongly a room or a flat is affected by heat.

These measurements are also of great significance in projects of the IOER for the validation of the thermal building simulation. In this context, a study is made regarding whether the measured indoor temperature course of the summer corresponds to the simulated course from the thermal building simulations (see Schünemann et al. 2021). An example of good agreement can be seen in the image on the right. Here it was assumed that the ventilation behaviour and presence of the occupants (except for holiday periods) is the same every day. Deviations that are visible at certain times can be attributed to the assumed user behaviour in the simulation (e.g. opening the window longer). However, the fact that the agreement between simulation and measurement is so high under the assumption of the same daily user behaviour shows that the residents do not show any adaptions in behaviour vis-à-vis the heat wave.