Thursday 3 September, the paper “how to Transform European Housing into Healthy and Sustainable Living Spaces”, co-authored by Petrus te Braak and Joeri Minnen of Research Group TOR, was presented at the Passive and Low Energy Architecture conference (PLEA2020). The manuscript presented is based on the monitoring project of both the house and the family that lived more than two years in a prototype renovated house (RenovActive by VELUX).The prototype seeks to offer healthy, affordable, easy to reproduce, scalable solutions for the existing building stock of European Housing. Research Group TOR was responsible for the sociological monitoring of the family during the project. The sociological monitoring attempted to find answers on the following questions:
The results on the basis of the sociological monitoring show that the family is very satisfied with their new living environment. The indoor comfort is assessed as very good. The family indicates that they are very satisfied with the indoor temperature and indoor air quality throughout their home. Regarding the behaviour of the dwellers, the technical monitoring soon showed that the dwellers did not always use the available equipment in a rational way to further increase the indoor comfort. Based on these findings, the manuscript discusses the importance of a user-driven system, without compromising on the reproducibility, where the user sees his or her priorities translated into the indoor comfort controlled by the equipment.