Thermal Comfort inside buildings

[James Semple]

I am trying to find adevice to display thermal comfort inside my apartment.  Perhaps this is not a familiar term to some people: it is more familiar to commercial architects to whom I used to teach building science, but it is relevant to all interior spaces where people work and live. 

Thermal comfort is a measure of how warm we feel inside a building and it is controlled by the following six factors:

1. Clothing. - heavy garments keep you warm

2. Physical Activity - expending energy keeps you warm

3. Air temperature 

4. Air velocity - air moving past you cools you by facilitating the evaporation of sweat

5. Air humidity - too high and you cannot sweat 

6. Radiant temperature - this measures the heat transferred to you through the air by radiation from the structure around you. 

In the laboratory we measured factors 3 to 6, estimated factors 1 and 2 from the type of work being done, fed the numbers into an equation and got another number for Thermal Comfort.  A very useful design tool for commercial interiors, but also relevant in the domestic environment of nerds of all kinds, but also of elderly and disabled people - such as myself. 

Is there someone out there looking for a new weather-related device to manufacture?