Designing an environmentally friendly building means taking into account the temperature that building occupants will want. If this estimate is incorrect, the occupants will spend their lives fiddling with the thermostat and opening the windows, lowering the energy efficiency of the building.
As you can imagine, to work out the right temperature for a building, we need to know what temperature will be comfortable for most people. This might sound easy, but currently we're getting it all wrong because, like so many things, we’re basing the "right" temperature on the assumption that all of humanity is an average-weight, middle-aged man.
A paper in today’s issue of the journal Nature Climate Change argues that the widely-used standard for calculating building temperatures is based on outdated assumptions about human metabolic rates. Improving our calculations would not only make the world a little less unfair, but it could also result in more energy-efficient building designs, the authors write.
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