A cost effective and reliable way for measuring the comfort performance of a building is simply by surveying the comfort satisfaction of the employees working in the building. For this we use Comfortmeter, a European web based subjective comfort survey tool developed in collaboration with several European universities. The tool polls the comfort experience of employees through 35 questions related to different comfort aspects, such as temperature, sound and air quality. Together with the comfort aspects, the comfort related user aspects – such as age, gender, years in the building, … - are polled. This information is used by the Comfortmeter model to filter out user influence in the reported comfort scores of the building.

The survey leads to a Comfortmeter report for the whole building as well as for separate building zones. A Comfortmeter report typically comprises 15 to 20 pages and includes:

• A summary of 1 page with the most important results.
• Detailed comfort reporting including more than 10 clear graphs and tables. In order to frame the specific building comfort values. The report also contains average, best practice and worst practice values as well as the error margins.
• Free comfort remarks formulated by the users, grouped by aspect (temperature, sound, air,…) and by building zone.
• An explanation about the used methodology.

Through a Comfort meter report, the building user and his service provider (e.g. ESCO) obtains a reliable and clear insight in the comfort performance of the building, for the strong as well as for the weak points. At the same time the report generates crucial information for increasing the comfort performance in the building on an efficient and focused way. This forms the basis for comfort requirements specifications and penalties specifications to be included in a EPC tender document.