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Development of Passive House Standard for Tropical Climate (Indonesia )-The

Initial Stage

Conference Paper · May 2016

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 Development of Passive House Standard for Tropical Climate
(Indonesia )- The Initial Stage
Santy#1, Hiroshi Matsumoto*2, Lusi Susanti*3
#1
Industrial Engineering Department,University of Pembangunan Nasional Veteran Jakarta
JL RS Famawati, South Jakarta, Indonesia
#1,*2Department of Architecture and Civil Engineering, Toyohashi University of Technology
Aichi Prefecture, Toyohashi shi Tenpaku cho Hibarigaoka 1-1, Japan
Industrial Engineering Department, Andalas University
Limau Manis, Padang- West Sumatera Indonesia
1santy@upnvj.ac.id

2matsu@ace.tut.ac.jp

3lusi@ft.unand.ac.id

Abstract
Research on thermal comfort in residential houses in Indonesia was limited. Previous
research in this field indicate that the western thermal comfort standard (ASHRAE
55, EN 15251, ISO 7730) was believed and proven higher for Indonesia people due
to different historical experience of climate. Therefore, this present study attempted
to develop a new predictive thermal comfort standard that suitable for Indonesian
people. This standard is aimed to provide minimum requirement for acceptable indoor
thermal environment. On the other side, in order to get feeling of comfort, Indonesian
people is now tended to widely use fan or air conditioner to obtain cooler
environment. Results of data collection from eighteen households represented the
electricity consumption for cooling needs in several cities in Indonesia is ranged
between 16-25% of total consumption, and ranked as second highest among all of the
consumption. The challenge is how to reduce household energy consumption without
compromising comfort level of occupants. For this aims, it is necessary to develope a
passive house standard for the tropical climate region like Indonesia. This paper
presents the initial stage of this project by outlining current climate in Indonesia,
characteristic of current typical house, temperature and electricity consumption.
Thermal comfort vote was also collected to investigate the occupants feeling of
thermal environment in their residential house.

Keywords –thermal comfort; tropical climate; passive house; energy consumption

1. Introduction
In this modern technology era, the tendency of using technologies for
heating or cooling to maintain the indoor thermal comfort is increasing. This
habit result on high energy consumption and led to the deficiency of fossil-
fuel reserve on the earth. In addition, greenhouse gases such as CFC
(chlorofluorocarbon) released by this cooling/heating devices had a significant
role in the degree of pollution on the earth. There are also many types of
diseases that can be generated from these gases. All those problems had a big
attention by researcher. One of the solutions offered by the researchers to the
problem described above is looking back into vernacular design principles in
harness the use of natural ways to grant indoor comfort to the occupants.
There are so many design principles might be used to reduce dependence
of the heating/cooling devices to achieved comfortable condition including
natural ventilation, shading devices, thermal insulation, radiative cooling,
evaporative cooling and etc. A house which utilized these principles, without
the use of active space heating or cooling is called as passive house. [1].
In the database of Passive House around the world compiled by iHPA,
Passive House Institute and Affiliates, there have been 1883 single detached
family houses registered as passive house in the several countries, but none in
Indonesia. At the point of fact, the development of passive house in Indonesia
is an urgent need. The number of population in Indonesia is increased every
year and this is force to the increasing amount of energy consumption. Passive
house is expected to suppress the energy consumption especially for cooling
energy needs. Previous researches in Indonesia found that cooling energy
consumption in Yogyakarta, Bandung and Padang were about 25%[2],16%
[2]and 17%[3] of total energy consumption respectively. Although Indonesia
is located in the equators and exposed by summer throughout the year, this
amount of cooling energy needs is still needed to reduce by the proper
designed of house and its micro climate.
This paper present the initial stage in the development of passive house
standard for tropical climate Indonesia. This stage was done by investigating
the climate, current house characteristic and also energy consumption. An
evaluation of thermal sensation vote was also done to investigate the
occupant’s comfort temperature. All these data is needed for energy
performance simulation in current typical house in Indonesia.
2. Indonesian Climate
In the initial stage, outdoor and indoor relative humidity and temperature
was collected from eighteen houses in Depok city, West Java (Fig. 1) which
is much closed to South Jakarta. In the previous research, it is obtained that
this city’s climate is in line with the majority cities in Indonesia. Data
collection was done by using RS-12 Thermorecorder (ESPECMIC) for one
week and set to record in interval 1 hour. The device was located in the living
room where the occupants spent of their time in the house. Furthermore, for
the analysis, the data is categorized into four time grouping (morning, noon,
evening and night) (Table 1). This grouping is based in the peak trend during
24 hours surveillance. Furthermore, this grouping will also be used for
investigation of occupant’s feel of comfort in outline in the next section.
 Result in Fig.2 and 3 showed the relationship between indoor and outdoor
air temperature and relative humidity in the morning, noon, evening and night
time. In these figures, it can be seen the difference of scatter distribution of air
temperature and relative humidity at those four time grouping. Regression line
was also drawn to demonstrate the relationship of outdoor and indoor air
temperature and relative humidity. The result shown positive value of
regression coefficient, both for air temperature and relative humidity. Thus,
coefficient of determination (R2) is lower than <0.5 which revealed that the
outdoor air temperature/humidity was not good enough to predict the indoor
air temperature/humidity. The possible reason for this fact is conceivable due
to various kinds of house constituent materials. It is well known that building
envelope materials are affect how the heat transfer from outdoor to indoor. In
addition, Fig.4.a demonstrated the average of indoor and outdoor air
temperature were ranged 25.6-35.5oC and 28.8-30.9oC respectively. The
indoor and outdoor relative humidity were ranged 54.5-60.1% and 43.2-71.9%
respectively. The air temperature was highest at noon reach up to 35.5oC, and
in the opposite the relative humidity reached the lowest around 43.2%. The
difference between indoor and outdoor temperature is ranged between 1oC
(night) to 4oC (noon), and the difference of relative humidity between indoor
and outdoor are 1% (evening) and 12% (morning) respectively.

Fig. 1 Map of Indonesia and data collection area

Table 1. Time grouping within a day
morning Noon evening night
Time 06.00 - 08.00 12.0 - 14.00 17.00 - 19.00 20.0 - 22.00
Fig. 2 Indoor vs outdoor air temperature

Fig. 3 Indoor vs outdoor relative humidity

 (a) (b)
Fig. 4 Average air temperature(a) and relative humidity(b) in a day

3. Thermal Comfort
Two occupants from each house (total 36 subjects) was asked to fill out
the thermal sensation vote (7 ASHARE Scale) when they are at home in a
week. They have to fill out the thermal sensation vote at four time grouping as
shown in Table 1. Totally, 916 votes were collected. They have to stay for
about 15 minutes in the living room before they fill out the questionnaire. This
is due to body precondition to maintain same metabolic rate which is estimated
to be equal to 1.0 Met.
Result in Fig. 5 exhibits the percentage distribution of votes. In the
morning, most of the occupants (88%) feel “neutral” (Scale 0), but at noon
52.6% feel “warm” and 33.1% feel “slightly warm”. In the evening about
44.7% feel “warm” and 49.4% feel “slightly warm”, and in the evening, most
of them feel slightly warm. The interesting point is they never feel cold within
a day when the mean daily temperature is 30.8oC.
In order to know the neutral temperature, regression analysis was done for
the indoor air temperature and thermal sensation vote (Fig. 6.a). Based on this
regression, the neutral temperature was found at 27.6oC which is slightly lower
than that is found by Feriadi and Wong’[4] in Yogyakarta where the comfort
temperature was 29.1oC on mean daily temperature at 29oC. Furthermore, the
result of present study was in line with Karyono [5] which compiled research
on thermal comfort in various kinds of building in Indonesia. The research
disclose that neutral temperature for people in Indonesia were about 27 to
28oC, which is higher than current national standard (24.5-27oC) (SNI
6390:2011). In addition, Sujatmiko [6] observed the level of neutrality,
acceptability and thermal preferences of the occupants in naturally ventilated
building in Bandung, Semarang and Bekasi presented that the acceptable
operative temperature was between 22.8 to 30.1 oC. This range is quite wide
due to big differences of mean daily temperature between Bandung (24oC)
and Semarang/Bekasi (28oC). Yet, the regression equation of indoor dry bulb
temperature and neutral temperature result revealed inline result with the
present study which showed the comfort temperature at 27.5 oC.
Karyono was compiled thermal comfort research in various kinds of
building in Indonesia and suggested a simple equation regression to predict
comfort temperature (PCT)[5]. This regression was result from mean daily
temperature and comfort temperature of several researches in Indonesia. Yet,
this equation was validated only for location with the average daily
temperature between 24oC and 29oC. Therefore, this equation is needed to be
upgraded by the current result of this present research. An upgrade PCT
(PCTu) was developed by adding the comfort temperature gained in Depok
city. As the consequence, this equation is able to apply in wider range of daily
temperature than the previous one, as 24–30.8oC. This equation is proposed to
be predictive comfort temperature in Indonesia and also an essential element
to the development of passive house standard in this country. The application
of this equation is to specify the house’s design that can be achieved this
comfort temperature in the specific daily temperature defined by this study.

Fig. 5 Percentage distribution of thermal comfort votes

 (a) (b)
Fig. 6 (a) Thermal sensation vote and (b) Predictive comfort temperature (upgrade)

4. House Characteristics
House characteristics of eighteen residential houses in Depok City were
compiled in Table 2. The majority of the houses (78%) is detached house.
Depok city is attached to South Jakarta which had 6.863 people/km2 for the
population density, and classified as high density [7]. Most of workers in
Jakarta live in BODETABEK (Bogor, Depok, Tangerang and Bekasi) area
encircle the province of DKI Jakarta, and they are usually commute every day
to their office. This reason result on high demand of residential house, but due
to land limitation, detached house is preferred than town house. Most of the
house’s wall are made of low brick and bricks and only a few made of Hebel
(Aerated Concrete). The low price of low bricks was the reason for this choice.
Floor material is dominated by ceramics especially to give a sense of cooling
within a house. Roof and the ceiling material mostly are tiles and gypsum
respectively. Latex paint with various light colors such as white, avocado, light
blue are chosen by the resident. The ceiling height in average was 3m and the
thickness of the wall is average on 13cm. The windows material is dominated
by Rayban glass intend to aim to retain heat and sunlight and finally reduce
the cooling energy requirement. The window type is mostly awning which
gives more privacy to the residence.
In the future part of this study, all this information will be used to design
a typical house in order to know the energy performance. EnergyPlus software
will be utilized for this purpose. The result should also be compare with the
energy performance in the passive house design in the future to validate and
prove the eminence of the passive house over the typical house.
 Table 2 House Characteristics

5. Electricity Consumption
The electricity consumption of the 18 investigation houses is
summarized in Table 3. Half of the households was consumed electricity
between 300-400kWh, and this result was in line with Sukarno and
Matsumoto[8] in Padang that found the average electricity consumed was 327,
07kWh/month.
In addition Figure 5 portraits the average use of electricity
consumption by the household. Cooling energy consumption was ranked in
second and this result was also in line with the previous one[2][3]. This
cooling energy means the use of fan or air conditioner to provide comfortable
living space. The use of air conditioner and fan in the average was 8hours/day,
but most of the households have more than one fan in the house, which means
the total used of the fan was sixteen hours or more. The price and ease to
maintenance are the possible reasons to choose fan for the cooling devices
rather than air conditioner. This electricity consumption will be employed as
the basic and be compared to the consumption by the future passive house.
 Table 3. Electricity consumption per month

Percentage Number of house

<300 KwH 29% 5
300 KwH - 400 KwH 59% 10
>400 KwH 12% 2
Total 100% 17

46%
electricity consumption

25%
Percentage of total

17%
7%
5%

Fig. 5 Percentage distribution of electricity consumption

6. Conclussion.
This research is the initial stage for the development of passive house in
tropical climate, Indonesia. In this stage, relationship of indoor and outdoor
temperature and humidity was shown and result that they do not have a
significant correlation, except indoor and outdoor relative humidity at noon.
The possible reason for this result might be due to various kind and size of
room and house envelope material constituent. In order to develop a passive
house, the occupants comfort temperature should be defined. An upgrade of
predictive comfort temperature was modified from Karyono [5] due to a wider
range of mean daily temperature gain in this study.
In addition, future research needs to investigate the energy performance
of current typical house in Indonesia, and to be compare with future passive
house design. Moreover, the electricity consumption in the typical house in
Indonesia which range between 300-400kWh/month is relatively high and
need to reduce as much as possible, by designing the passive house which
adapts to Indonesian climate.
Acknowledgment
The authors would like to acknowledge all the people who participated as
respondents in this research. The first author is grateful to the Ministry of
Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) Japan for
providing support during the study.
 References
[1] Suitable Energy Ireland, Passive homes. 2007.
[2] M. E. Wijaya and T. Tezuka, “A comparative study of households’ electricity consumption
characteristics in Indonesia: A techno-socioeconomic analysis,” Energy Sustain. Dev., vol.
17, no. 6, pp. 596–604, Dec. 2013.
[3] I. Sukarno, H. Matsumoto, L. Susanti, and R. Kimura, “Urban Energy Consumption in a
City of Indonesia : General Overview,” vol. 5, no. 1, pp. 360–373, 2015.
[4] H. Feriadi and N. H. Wong, “Thermal comfort for naturally ventilated houses in
Indonesia,” Energy Build., vol. 36, no. 7, pp. 614–626, Jul. 2004.
[5] T. Karyono, “Predicting Comfort Temperature in Indonesia, an Initial Step to Reduce
Cooling Energy Consumption,” Buildings, vol. 5, no. 3, pp. 802–813, 2015.
[6] W. Sujatmiko, “Development of the Adaptive Thermal Comfort Satndard for Residential
in Indonesia,” vol. 3, no. 2, pp. 27–29, 2011.
[7] Portal Berita Resmi Pemerintah Kota Depok, “Demografi,” 2016. .
[8] I. Sukarno, H. Matsumoto, R. Kimura, and L. Susanti, “Residential energy consumption in
a local city of Indonesia,” in 23rd Pacific Conference of the Regional Science Association
International (RSAI), 2013.

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