Comfort analysis applied to the international standard “Active House”: the case of RhOME, the winning prototype of Solar Decathlon 2014

The relationship between indoor comfort and climatic context is essential to assure a superior liveable environment for occupants. The international approach called Active House (AH) proposes a ranking system to evaluate the provided indoor comfort, which is the same through the whole Europe, without acknowledging the variety of social-cultural contexts of each country. This paper aims to understand whether the AH methodology can be proposed both for continental and Mediterranean climates, evaluating the indoor comfort performances of a single-family home in four different climatic conditions, representative of different climate severities. The RhOME for denCity building, the winning prototype of the international competition Solar Decathlon 2014, has been used as experimental case study. From the results a variation of the AH comfort thresholds is proposed to fulfil the cultural and social environment of warm regions, considering the acclimatization process which arise the boundary of comfort acceptability. The proposed new comfort threshold still provide high thermal comfort expectation with an energy saving estimation of about 1.7% for each half degree Celsius reduction.