Comfort Electronic Tool

Designing for Occupant Comfort

The ASHRAE Comfort Standard (55-2004) is often used to determine the acceptable limits of temperature, airspeed, and humidity for building occupants in both mechanically and naturally conditioned spaces.

In mechanically conditioned spaces, the standard utilizes the PMV (Predicted Mean Vote) math, and the graphical solution is one means of compliance. An occupant’s comfort level is highly influenced by their metabolic rate and clothing levels. This program allows one to see the effects of changing these key variables.

In use for many years, this program was used to generate the graphs used in the 2004 release of Standard 55. The use of this graph may aid in proving compliance to LEED 2009 Comfort requirements.

When the user changes a parameter in the data box, and presses "show", a second comfort envelope is presented over the first.

The program can output results to either a text file, using an embedded text editor, or to excel spreadsheet format.

Note that this program has several help screens in a user help manual. Comfort terms are defined as well.