Warm drowsy meetings, stuffy classrooms, freezing office spaces, cold waiting areas, or just a room at home that never seems to feel ‘warm enough’. Everyone understands the importance of thermal comfort.
And they understand its impact, particularly following a year where everyone has spent more time inside than ever before. The bodies are amazingly sensitive to temperature change. A lack of thermal comfort makes us feel stressed, annoyed, and distracted if it is too cold and sleepy, tired, and lacking concentration if it is too hot.
Thermal comfort and implications
When individuals feel uncomfortable, their mood changes for the worse. As a result, thermal comfort has an impact on well-being, productivity, and ability to think clearly. More importantly, excessively cold or hot interiors are unhealthy, especially for the elderly, sick, or vulnerable during intense heatwaves or harsh winters.
Thermal comfort has an impact on well-being, productivity, and ability to think clearly
Can more thermally comfortable buildings lower hospital admissions, and reduce sick days and absenteeism? Improve academic performance? Prevent accidents or improve the productivity of companies? Individuals know the answers already. They work better, learn better, perform better, and feel healthier when they are comfortable.
Understanding thermal comfort
Simply put, thermal comfort is the condition where a person is not feeling too hot or too cold. Of course, feeling too warm or too hot is highly subjective. Individuals cannot please all the people all the time when it comes to thermal comfort. That is why a mean internationally-recognized ‘average of comfort’, known as Predicted Mean Vote (PMV), was developed.
Thermal comfort is more than just temperature. It is influenced by six key factors:
- Metabolic rate (if very active or just sitting in one place all day)
- The clothes
- Ambient (air) temperature
- How fast that air is moving around
- The humidity of the air
- Radiant temperature
Radiant temperature: The temperature of surfaces, such as walls or windows, as well as sources of heat such as the sun or a radiator has a significant impact on comfort. For example, individuals may feel heat from a radiator on one side of their body while the other side may feel cool if it faces a cold window.
That is why radiators are installed close to windows to improve their radiant temperature. If individuals switch off this radiator, they will quickly feel discomfort if they are close to this cold window even if the air temperature is still the same.
How Insulation Improves Thermal Comfort
Insulation improves both the ambient temperature and the radiant temperature of surfaces
The best long-term solution to ensure overall thermal comfort is insulation. Insulation improves both the ambient temperature and the radiant temperature of surfaces such as external walls, floors, and ceilings.
Insulation blocks the path of heat. In winter, an insulated home enjoys good thermal comfort due to improved heat retention and improved wall and ceiling surface temperature. In summer, it acts as a barrier to external heat keeping interiors cooler.
Proper insulation in walls, ceilings, and floors directly impacts the speed of ambient temperature change inside a building’s envelope. Without insulation, the tendency is to turn up heating or air-conditioning to compensate for temperature changes which is wasteful, increases energy bills, and has a negative environmental impact.
Good air sealing is essential
To maximize the performance of insulation, it is vital to also have good air sealing, which means ‘fixing holes’ in the building such as uninsulated attic junctions or gaps around windows where conditioned air can leak out. It is equally essential to use solutions that allow the building to remain air-tight but also to allow excess humidity, such as in bathrooms, to escape. A properly-vented bathroom fan will help avoid any risk of condensation.
Thermal comfort plays a large role in the way we experience the places where we live and work. Comfortable building occupants are happy, healthy, and productive. Fiberglass insulation, combined with air sealing, can help make living and work spaces more comfortable and energy-efficient year-round.