Assessment of Thermal Comfort Conditions in Traditional Mud Houses
Akubue J. A..
Department Architecture, Baze University, Abuja, Nigeria
DOI: 10.36108/laujoces/6202.61.0122
Abstract
The issue of occupant thermal comfort is paramount in the discussion of sustainable housing. In the case of Sub-Saharan Africa where majority of the population live in Low-cost houses, identifying the best solutions to indoor thermal comfort is of significant value. This study was conducted in order to gather information on the thermal and climatic conditions as well as the thermal preferences of occupants of traditional mud houses in the South-Eastern part of Nigeria. The thermal preference and climatic data collected through physical measurement and surveys were subjected to descriptive analysis. Graphs and normal distribution tables were used to determine the comfort temperature, thermal sensation and thermal preference of the occupants. While the Actual Mean Vote (AMV) of the occupants for the surveyed traditional buildings indicated that none of the respondents felt neutral (0), the Thermal Sensation vote (TSV) recorded a mean Sensation value of -2.4 with SD 1.2, indicating a cool condition and 1.0 with SD (0) indicating a warm condition. This result agrees with the common logical assumption of thermal comfort standard that under neutral conditions the occupants should prefer to feel neither cooler nor warmer meaning that their conditions were neutral in overall preference. The result of the study reveals that thermal comfort has significant value as well as indicated that more research is required in some of the aspects of the study, especially in the area of design, performance of traditional building materials and other variables that determine thermal comfort in the traditional mud residential buildings such as the adoption of appropriate window openings and cross ventilation of room spaces to further improve the indoor natural conditions within the buildings in the study area.
Keywords: Mud houses, Thermal comfort, Thermal sensation, Thermal preferences, Traditional buildings, South-eastern Nigeria.