Whole year evaluation of thermal comfort using international standards EN16798-1 and TR16798-2

There is an increasing interest in evaluating the indoor environment on a yearly basis. The technical report (TR16798-2) to EN16798-1 recommend criteria for thermal comfort evaluation based on heating and cooling seasons, but do not give clear indications of how to manage the transition between them. This study used dynamic simulations to evaluate the thermal comfort level and energy use when the heating-cooling seasons are defined either by a pre-fixed date, by identifying the periods with energy requirements for heatingcooling or by considering prevailing outdoor conditions. The results show that a better thermal comfort level was obtained when the heating-cooling seasons were defined by using prevailing outdoor conditions, without a significantly higher energy use compared to the other two cases. Including a transition period between seasons where only heating is available was observed to optimize both energy use and thermal comfort. The study also evaluated the thermal comfort level in buildings with and without air-conditioning systems using categories of indoor environment and a yearly thermal comfort score. The results showed that the latter yielded to similar conclusions when assessing the annual thermal comfort but in a much simpler manner than using indoor environmental categories.