Satisfaction with one’s home and comfort: a contradiction in a tiny house?
People are spending more and more time indoors. Indoor comfort is therefore all the more important. It is therefore worth putting a great deal of effort into planning to ensure a healthy and pleasant indoor climate, fresh air, and good acoustics.
As part of a student research project at the Peter Behrens School of Arts, Düsseldorf University of Applied Sciences, 28 mini-houses in Germany, Austria and Switzerland were analysed in terms of interior comfort.
Through targeted variations in the areas of ventilation, passive cooling, window size and quality, building component structures and surfaces (including heat transfer coefficients and thermal mass), solar protection and structural shading, as well as combinations thereof, proposals for improvement were developed with regard to comfort parameters and energy consumption. In particular, the influence of the small living area and the limited room volume per occupant was studied.
These targeted parameter changes were primarily intended to help the students gain an understanding of the effects of individual influencing factors and, in some cases, also involved changes to the building envelope and window areas, as well as their qualities.
Based on the status quo models, indoor comfort parameters of the actual building conditions were evaluated and compared with the effects of the variants under investigation. For each mini-house, a standardised information profile was created regarding geometry and building physics and services engineering properties. The main living space was analysed under real-world conditions with regard to the indoor climate (room temperature, relative humidity, CO₂ concentration) using the SimRoom software [SimRoom 2020] and with regard to daylight provision using the Velux Daylight Visualizer software [Velux 2020]. In some cases, short-term on-site measurements were also taken within the houses and compared with the simulation results.
The buildings studied represent different types of mini-houses (on wheels, elevated on stilts or with conventional foundations); they are mostly permanent and only in exceptional cases used as show homes or for temporary purposes, and are all detached. The years of construction range from 2009 to 2023. In 24 cases, the construction method is timber-frame or timber-post construction, whilst two houses each were built using solid timber construction and brick construction with concrete floors respectively.
Would you like to find out more about this topic? Then read the full article in Kleiner Wohnen magazine.
The text was written by Prof. Dr.-Ing. Eike Musall (an architect who teaches in the Department of Architecture at Düsseldorf University of Applied Sciences. He conducts research into concepts, strategies and assessment methods for climate-neutral buildings. He heads the interdisciplinary Institute for Quality of Life and Environmentally Sustainable Urban Development (In-LUST) at the HSD, which promotes sustainable changes and innovations in construction projects and urban neighbourhoods, and is a member of the Centre for Innovative Energy Systems (ZIES) at the HSD.
The article was also written by Nadine Nebel (M.A.). She studied design at Düsseldorf University of Applied Sciences, worked as a freelance scenographer and is now a research officer in the Department of Architecture at the Peter Behrens School of Arts. She is pursuing her PhD at RWTH Aachen University and, in her doctoral thesis, is researching approaches to improving quality of life in small living spaces. At Düsseldorf University of Applied Sciences, she works with the ‘lilmore’ research group on issues relating to quality of life and residential satisfaction in small living spaces.
