Opportunities and challenges in monitoring the thermal performance of passive buildings in India.
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Apr.2016
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Conference Paper
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In the context of climate change, reduction in operational energy of buildings has gained a prominent focus amongst researchers and practitioners. India and the U.S. have both used design strategies to provide comfortable indoor environments with no or marginal reliance on conventional energy sources, but often with significant differences in their approaches and historical context. In particular, certain locations in both countries offer opportunities to design and operate buildings that are naturally ventilated or mixed-mode (combining operable windows and mechanical cooling). Historical or vernacular case studies have provided empirical evidence of climate responsiveness, however the lessons learned have not been deployed in the mainstream. Absence of rigorous performance evaluation might be one of the reasons behind the lack of large scale deployment of such design strategies. This paper documents the challenges and lessons learned from an extensive monitoring study undertaken in India. It forms a part of a larger project that aims at formulating a set of protocols of such field monitoring activity and evaluating the performance of selected passive strategies. Observations were made for each stage of monitoring, from building selection to data quality assurance. We found that many buildings were not necessarily constructed or operated as originally designed vis-�-vis the passive strategies we were studying. In some cases the physical components of a passive strategies were not maintained properly. Our experience also emphasizes the importance of having a local champion in the building being monitored. We realized the significance of understanding the trade-offs between the quality and extent of instrumentation as well as the value of allowing flexibility in the monitoring plan to make real-time changes on site.
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3,1-12p.
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Faculty of Technology
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OTHER
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2016 ACEEE Summer Study on Energy Efficiency in Buildings: From Components to Systems, From Buildings to Communities