Investigating health- and occupant behaviour related IAQ risks in a naturally ventilated child-care facility

Deme Bélafi, Zsófia and Barna, Edit (2026) Investigating health- and occupant behaviour related IAQ risks in a naturally ventilated child-care facility. In: Roomvent 2026, 2026.09.15-18., Prága, Csehország. (In Press)

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Abstract

Health and well-being in buildings is in the centre of scientific attention for many decades now, especially after the recent world-wide pandemia. At the same time, the energy performance of buildings is also of attention. EU’s recent EPBD recast highlights the importance of maintaining adequate indoor environmental quality (IEQ) in buildings, i.e. energy related actions on the building cannot jeopardise e.g. the indoor air. The research in the field of IEQ is broad and many projects focused on office and residential buildings. However, other building types are underrepresented and also majority of studies focus on developed countries with one certain construction type. This study’s aim is to investigate the health-related risks emerging from certain IAQ conditions and their causality with occupant behaviour in case of a child-care facility. Methods used include a winter-to-summer season monitoring campaign of 4 group rooms of a child-care facility in rural Hungary which has a regionally typical building structure that has gone through energy renovation lately. The naturally ventilated building has typical heating system and no cooling. The time-series dataset of the monitoring campaign is supplemented by subjective data: in-house occupancy and daily schedule values, weather data and occupant behaviour-related interviews. In three rooms out of 4, indoor CO2 levels are above 2000 ppm for more than 2 hours in majority of the days. Differences in IAQ are clearly explained by interviews about window opening behaviour. This study clearly shows the direct impact of adults’ window opening behaviour on the healthy everyday environment of children.

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