Indoor Environmental Quality with an Emphasis on Thermal Comfort in Traditional Houses, Case studies: Two Qajar Houses in Shiraz

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the U. S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (1995) stated that people spend about 90 percent of their time indoors and various aspects of indoor environment affect the occupant`s well-being and performance. This resulted in the development of various standards to improve indoor environmental quality (IEQ) in recent years. Iranian spend Approximately 75 percent of their life indoors and as IEQ directly affects occupant`s health, it is requires special attention. IEQ is comprised of many intricate factors including: daylighting, thermal comfort, IAQ (Indoor Air Quality), acoustics, etc. These factors make the study of IEQ a lot more complex, and during the review of literature of this article, it was found that most studies concentrated on merely one aspect of IEQ or the other. Hence, this research seeks to focus on indoor thermal comfort through a cumulative index. Some residences built during Qajar dynasty in Shiraz were selected as case studies and their thermal conditions were evaluated based upon the measurement of major climatic parameters in six separate rooms, on two different days: first of September 2014 and 21 of Jun 2015. Then by the Design Builder software utilized to assess the PMV, the rooms were modelled during the year and the results of the data’s were analyzed in two steps. First, annual PMV data were compared with the ASHRAE standard 55 and then, architectural elements of the rooms were studied to find out the relation between these elements and thermal conditions. The findings of this study indicates that most of the rooms of these old residences such as Shahneshin (The main Sitting chamber) are in acceptable range, while the value of thermal comfort index (ASHRAE) are in comfortable range from October to May. In conclusion, the outcome of this study contributes to suggest design guidelines for energy efficiency for residential buildings in Shiraz.