Summertime temperatures and thermal comfort in UK homes

This is an Author's Accepted Manuscript of an article published in Building Research and Information [copyright Taylor & Francis], available online at: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/09613218.2013.757886Internal summertime temperatures measured in 268 homes in the UK city of Leicester are reported. The hourly data was collected from living rooms and bedrooms during the summer of 2009, which was generally cool but with a short hot spell. Some household interviews were conducted. The sample of homes is statistically representative of the socio-technical characteristics of the city’s housing stock. The data provides insight into the influence of house construction, energy system usage and occupant characteristics on the incidence of elevated temperatures and thermal discomfort. The warmest homes were amongst the 13% that were heated. Significantly more of these were occupied by those over 70 who are particularly vulnerable to high temperatures. The national heatwave plan might usefully caution against summertime heating. Temperatures in the 230 free-running homes were analysed using both static criteria and criteria associated with the BSEN15251 adaptive thermal comfort model. These indicated that that flats tended to be significantly warmer than other house types. Solid wall homes and detached houses tended to be significantly cooler. It is argued that adaptive criteria provide a valuable and credible framework for assessing internal temperatures in free-running UK homes. However, the temperatures in the Leicester homes were much lower than anticipated by the BSEN15251 model. Numerous possible reasons for this discrepancy are discussed

Developing safety signs for children on board trains

This is the author’s version of a work that was accepted for publication in Applied Ergonomics. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.apergo.2011.05.012Every year a significant number of young children are injured as a result of accidents that occur on board trains in Great Britain. These accidents range from being caught in internal doors, slips, trips and falls and injuries caused by seats. We describe our efforts working with RSSB to design a new set of safety signs in order to help prevent such accidents occurring. The research involved running a set of workshops with young school children (aged 4-10, n=210) and showing them examples of existing train signs and gathering the requirements for new designs. A second set of workshops with these children was used to evaluate the new signs based on the outcomes from the earlier workshop. We describe our findings alongside a set of outline guidelines for the design of safety signs for young children, A final section outlines possibilities for future research