Occupants Interaction with Electric Lighting and Shading Systems in Real Single-occupied Offices: Results from a Monitoring Campaign

This study presents a contribution to the characterization of occupants’ behavior regarding the manual control of electric lighting in combination with shading control in offices. The procedure and monitoring results for eight single-occupied office spaces is described. The analysis of the collected data indicated that occupants kept electric lighting On during most of the monitoring period and, in average, that lower daylight illuminances led occupants to keep the lights On more frequently. It was also found that at times of arrival and departure the control patterns for lighting were mostly driven by occupation dynamics rather than by the environmental conditions. The results for the control patterns for shading systems concurrently showed that occupants frequently opened their shading device upon arrival, and, for half of the offices, closed it upon departure. On the other hand, at intermediate periods, the control patterns were mainly independent of occupation dynamics and dependant on environmental variables, but at very different degrees depending on the particular office considered. A further analysis of the control patterns for shading systems indicated that control patterns as found in the literature, which had been mostly derived from data obtained for offices in which the experiment required frequent actions from the occupant, correlated well with the experimental results only in predicting the absence of any shading control action, but were poor predictors of control actions (shading deployment).