The Importance of Building Criteria on Cooling Energy Demand of a Low Cost Residential House: Thailand Case Study

This paper presents a research finding on the cooling energy demand of a low cost residential house in Thailand. A detached house originally is no mechanical cooling systems as a favour of cost saving. Recently, a number of existing two-storey houses installed an air conditioning unit gradually increase. The effect of current situation on building energy demand is investigated using the energy simulation. The study parameters include one air conditioned bedroom, two types of wall materials, house orientation and one row houses arrangement. Two study scenarios referred as a period of air conditioning unit work with 12 months and 8.5 months, except mild weather months, are computed, analysed and presented. The results point out that the energy demand in the scenario two is 30.8% or 52.6 kWh/ m2.year lower than the scenario one. The cooling energy demand could be reduced up to 28.4 % or 50.1 kWh/m2.year for only changing wall material from concrete block hollow to aerated concrete. The east facing house consumes less energy followed by north, west and south due to the transparent and opaque area of east orientation that influenced by the solar gain is smaller. However, it should be noted that the different between the east and south orientation is as little as 6 % or 12 kWh/m2.year. Similarly, the simulation result on a row of ten houses shows that the first and the last house in the row consume more energy than the less only 3%. Thus, the influential parameter on the cooling energy demand of this low cost residential house is period of air conditioning unit operation, wall material, direction of house facing and, almost no effect, the house arrangement in a row.