Evaluation on present situations of safety on thermal environment in residential houses in Japanese winter season using BEST-H program

Abstract

In this paper, the present situations on the safety of thermal environment in residential houses in winter season were evaluated by using the BEST-H program, a computation tool for analysing the thermal load in residential houses. In this analysis, the climate conditions for each primary division area in Japan were imposed to the input conditions for the thermal load computations. We also evaluated the safety of thermal environment with the hazard rate for both the cardiac and the brain diseases from the combination between the computational results using the BEST-H program and the several statistical data. Through the investigations, the following two findings were obtained: (1) the proposed method was validated for the evaluation of the safety on the thermal environment in the residential houses in winter season by comparing the computational results with the statistical data from the Population Survey Report in Japan.: (2) More houses with suitable insulation performance should be established in the western area and northern part of the Kanto area in Japan. The near future direction of our study is to evaluate variable countermeasures, such as one-room insulation.