Indoor environmental monitoring of residential buildings in Saudi Arabia, Makkah: A case study

Abstract

In Saudi Arabia, buildings require significant amounts of energy, especially during the cooling season, because of excessive air conditioning demands related to the high outdoor temperatures. Residential buildings consume more than 50% of electricity in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, where air conditioning loads represent 70% of the consumption. The main aim of the paper is to improve indoor thermal performance of existing residential buildings in Saudi Arabia, using Makkah as a case study. The methodology is to choose typical low-rise residential buildings to evaluate indoor thermal performance of existing residential buildings in Makkah, then calibrate this with the simulated results taken from thermal analysis software (TAS) to validate them, finally adding few energy efficiency measures to decrease the cooling load in the case study building. The result is expected to show similarity between the two results and also indicate that the energy conservation measures used can decrease the cooling load to as high as 34.5%.