Energy retrofitting and thermal comfort improvement of rural housing typologies in Iran

Rural housing is an important issue in Iran due to the large number of villages, their geographical dispersion, the fragile rural economy, and the crucial role of rural development in sustainable development. Considering these subjects, policies regarding rural housing development and its quality improvement are to be deduced, which results in rural housing typologies template in different climatic condition. Scientific progress, such as development in valid accurate measurement and advancements in simulation tools provide possibilities for quantitative evaluation,. Moreover it should be noted that these patterns are extracted from existing buildings which have the potential of retrofitting. Beside the importance of rural housing topic, this opportunity facilitate the evaluation of aforementioned proposed building templates, design developments, and improvement of details for higher performance. Many researchers investigated the rural housing and building typology, in which resulted in proposing special typologies as repeatable suggestions. Due to the fact that human life is totally interrelated to energy and comfort, building performance improvement is of great significant. Therefore, the energy performance and comfort hours of the proposed schematic designed buildings, suggested by “Islamic Revolution Housing Foundation”, are studied in the five provinces with the highest number of rural households, and  the most possible variation of climate dispersion, e.g., Razavi Khorasan, Mazandaran, West Azarbayjan, Fars, and Sistan-Baloochestan.   3 Therefore this paper investigate the energy and comfort performance of these building typologies in five different climatic condition, using computational modelling and simulation through Energyplus software and its graphic interface, DesignBuilder. In the next step, the improvement resulted through retrofitting activities in different parameters of the designed building, (e.g., building fabric, windows characteristics, ventilation rate, orientation), have been discussed, in abovementioned climatic conditions. The main purpose is to utilize passive solutions before using active approaches. Based on the results, first of all the energy demand varies from 230 kWh/m2 to 435kWh/m2 in the four studied typologies in different climate conditions, which is too far from the national and international energy consumption benchmarks and accepted range in residential stock. Passive strategies including optimum building orientation, roof and wall insulation, window replacements resulted in minimum 16% and maximum 30.5% reduction in the total energy demand in different climates. In addition this study shows that among proposed alternatives, which typology is more appropriate for each climatic condition, and which. Furthermore it shows that which energy retrofit action is more compatible for each building, i.e., lower energy consumption demand, higher daylight area, and better thermal comfort condition in surveyed building typologies. On the other hand, optimized window to wall ratio and orientation, are proposed beside the improvements resulted by each retrofit action during design process, before construction, and retrofit of existing buildings. In the other word, the reduction in energy consumption in designed buildings, or energy conservation of the existing houses based on retrofit actions of each parameters, are the main advantage of this paper. Results shows that energy production, especially in form of renewable energy resources, are of the most significance beside the abovementioned actions. Utilizing renewable energy systems (photovoltaics and solar hot water), the energy demand reduction reaches maximum 84% in comparison to the base cases. In addition, the independency of rural housing from the energy grid and the resulted economic benefits, are obviously consolidated via renewable energy production in most of the climatic condition in Iran, which to be surveyed in further researches.