Exploring thermal comfort in rural houses of Chhattisgarh state, India: A comprehensive survey and adaptive model analysis

Thermal comfort studies in India are very much at an emerging stage. According to Indian codes, in the summer, the comfortable temperature range for residential buildings is 23–26 °C. The recommended Indian residential comfort range does not consider the impact of India's enormous cultural and geographical heterogeneity. Additionally, there seems to be very little effort to conduct a thermal comfort field survey in India's rural regions. In recent years, houses in rural India have been converted from kutcha (mud houses) to pucca (concrete houses). This work is aimed at proposing an adaptive thermal comfort model for the premonsoon season in the rural area of Raipur, Chhattisgarh, India. The model was achieved using a field study survey conducted in 80 rural area houses in the months of June and July. Regression analysis, the Griffiths method, and the Fanger method have been adopted to analyze thermal comfort. Based on the regression analysis, the comfort band (voting −1 to +1) is established in the range of 28.39 °C to 32.31 °C, with 30.30 °C as the neutral temperature. The study has been carried out to assess the influence of gender, age, controls, and fan usage on thermal comfort perception in rural households.