Environmental and energy saving potential from greywater in hotels.

Reducing energy consumption, increasing energy efficiency technologies and solutions, decreasing emissions are very effective tools towards EU environmental policy. The constant demand for domestic hot water (DHW) throughout the year creates great benefits for drain water heat recovery (DWHR) systems in hotels, which is the most promising and significant feature of energy saving potential for the hotel sector in Poland. This paper determines the feasibility of heat recovery in a typical hotel in Poland. The energy analysis was carried out for the installed DWHR system (from washbasins and showers) at the hotel building. To evaluate the energy saving potentiality, daily, monthly and yearly calculation results were performed for an exemplary hotel in Poland. Two types of heat exchangers were adopted for further calculations: vertical (System 1) and horizontal (System 2), this intention aimed to find the most efficient type and relevant solution of energy saving and reduction of CO2 emissions in the analysed hotel. The analysis and calculations were repeated to enhance the saving potentiality of the proposed DWHR systems for various parameters like constant and variable temperature of supply cold water, daily hot water consumption profiles, the efficiency of heat recovery, reduction of annual carbon dioxide emission (CDE), facility standard of operating procedure, the impact of hotel size, etc. The obtained results of the conducted calculations ensure a significant potential of energy savings by implementing the proposed DWHR systems in analysed hotel, which allow to save energy demand and to reduce CO2 emission by 27.3% and improve the efficiency of the DHW preparation system.

Publisher Correction: The Scales Project, a cross-national dataset on the interpretation of thermal perception scales.

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

The Scales Project, a cross-national dataset on the interpretation of thermal perception scales.

Thermal discomfort is one of the main triggers for occupants' interactions with components of the built environment such as adjustments of thermostats and/or opening windows and strongly related to the energy use in buildings. Understanding causes for thermal (dis-)comfort is crucial for design and operation of any type of building. The assessment of human thermal perception through rating scales, for example in post-occupancy studies, has been applied for several decades; however, long-existing assumptions related to these rating scales had been questioned by several researchers. The aim of this study was to gain deeper knowledge on contextual influences on the interpretation of thermal perception scales and their verbal anchors by survey participants. A questionnaire was designed and consequently applied in 21 language versions. These surveys were conducted in 57 cities in 30 countries resulting in a dataset containing responses from 8225 participants. The database offers potential for further analysis in the areas of building design and operation, psycho-physical relationships between human perception and the built environment, and linguistic analyses.