environment
Thermal Comfort Housing For
Malaysia, China And Arab Countries
By Mohd. Peter Davis & Nor Azian Nordin, Universiti Putra Malaysia, Mazlin Ghazali, Arkitek M. Ghazali, Kuala Lumpur and
Gregers Reimann, Technical University of Denmark
T
errace houses are regarded by
their owners as being too hot on
around half the days of the year.
This is the conclusion of many random
household surveys conducted by final
year students at Universiti Putra
Malaysia. Our research at UPM aims to
change the present situation, whereby
thermally comfortable houses belong to
the lucky few who can afford whole-
house air conditioning. In 1998, we
built very affordable 640sf, 3-bedroom
‘Rapidwall’ houses on the UPM campus
that stay cool with one air-conditioning
consuming only RM30 of electricity per
month. Now we have taken the research
a stage further. Using our Malaysian
version of Danish building simulation
software, we have designed a larger
1,180sf, 21/2-storey ‘Quarter-detached’
house that promises to stay within the
thermal comfort zone without any air-
conditioning at all. Imagine four
double-storey terrace houses under one
roof, one on each corner and that is
our Quarter-D. The houses are
sufficiently cool that the roof space can
later be renovated with a gable end
window and 250sf of headroom, an
ideal space for teenagers. The Quarter-
D is designed as an environmentally
friendly and economical alternative to
terrace housing. Showhouses will soon
be built on the UPM campus.
Interesting Questions
How will the affordable Quarter-D
house, designed to be thermally
comfortable and energy efficient in the
Malaysian humid tropics, perform in the
temperate climate of Shanghai or the
much cooler Beijing or even the hot
desert climate of Bahrain? How can the
design be optimised to each of these quite
different climates? A new computer
technology, developed at Universiti Putra
Malaysia over the last four years in
collaboration with researchers from the
Technical University of Denmark,
together with Kuala Lumpur-based
Arkitek M.Ghazali has recently enabled
us to answer these seemingly academic
questions. This article proposes that
Thermal Comfort Housing, combined
with a serious commitment to modernise
the housing industry, can create a major
new industry in Malaysia.
Malaysian Housing Is Appealing
Consider the following comment that
appeared in the Property Times (New
Straits Times, February 22, 2003):
“After seeing the good quality and
lower prices of low and medium-cost
housing (in Malaysia), Hassan is on the
lookout for a credible Malaysian
contractor to develop a RM700 million
public housing project in Bahrain.”
Hassan Ebrahim Kamal heads the
Properties and Investment Committee of
the Bahrain Chamber of Commerce. His
private company has teamed up with the
Malaysian real estate agency, SK
Brothers Realty Sdn Bhd.
This interest in Malaysia’s housing
success is not an isolated phenomenon.
Request for help with social housing is
always high on the agenda when
representatives of developing countries,
such as Nelson Mandela visit Malaysia.
The developing world looks admiringly
at Malaysia’s modern urban housing,
which has resettled and industrialised a
traditional, rural and agricultural society,
and avoided the human degradation of
squatter townships.
The Global Housing Market
If developing countries are to follow
Malaysia’s good example, a colossal
number of new dwellings are required.
We estimate the number to be 500
million! Faced with housing prospects
on such a grand scale, scientists,
engineers and developers need to think
creatively. Can the Malaysian housing
industry rebuild itself to mass-produce
affordable and socially acceptable
housing for other countries? Can
Malaysia, with its excellent 50-year track
record in social housing, become the
Town and City Builder for the developing
world? The challenge before us is to pull
together the experts, the building
B U L E T I N I N G E N I E U R 35
systems, Malaysian tradesmen and the
financial structure capable of designing
and building entirely new townships and
cities, not within a 10 to 20 year
timeframe, but in two years. This task is
not without precedent. More than 50
years ago, scientists, engineers and
building professionals rose to the
occasion with mass housing projects
which played a key role in rebuilding
war-shattered Europe and Japan under
President Roosevelt’s ‘Marshall Plan’.
This helped create a 20-year post-war
economic boom, where optimism and
‘prosper thy neighbour’ became a way
of life. We had a glimpse of what the
world could be.
Obsolete Building Techniques
Clearly, Malaysia cannot hope to
compete on a global scale with the
obsolete building techniques now in use.
It takes, on average, one worker one year
to build a double-storey house; an
extremely low productivity by world
standards. The foreign building workers
in Malaysia cannot work any harder.
Their inefficiency stems from primitive
building techniques based on little more
than sand, cement and sweated labour.
Similar indeed to the construction of the
Egyptian Pyramids 8,000 years ago! Over
the last 10 years, the wages of building
workers have tripled. The excessive
labour cost per house has combined with
land speculation and a poorly
coordinated bureaucracy to make houses
too expensive. Double-storey terrace
houses, comprising 70% of urban
housing, are now way beyond the
affordability of the large majority of
Malaysian families. To buy a terrace
house requires 6-8 years of gross family
income (average RM2,000 per month
according to the Year 2000 National
Census), whilst the international rule of
thumb for housing affordability is only
three years of family income. Home
ownership increasingly requires the
finances of two generations, with parents
giving large donations to get their
children into houses.
 environment
Modernising The Housing Industry
To make housing affordable to
families in developing countries needs
more, not less technology. Building
workers under expert supervision need
to construct 10 to 20 houses per worker
per year from factory-produced
components using mass production
techniques adapted from the automotive
industry.
This Industrialised Building System
approach has been advocated for many
years by researchers at Universiti Putra
Malaysia and has been used to construct
35 Thermal Comfort Houses on the
campus. For instance, the basic
structure of the semi-detached houses
shown in the photo were completed in
nine days using a crane to assemble
factory-produced walls (‘Rapidwall’)
and a highly insulated metal roof
system, which was later developed into
‘UPM Cool Roof’. Using mass production
techniques in large housing projects, we
believe the walls could be erected in
one day on a previously prepared
concrete slab by a small specialised
team of workers, and the roof could be
erected on the following day by another
specialist team. More follow-on teams
such as electricians, plumbers, door and
window installers, plasterers and tillers,
all working under modern civilised
conditions are then given one day each
to complete their particular task.
Whatever industrialised building
systems are adopted for a particular
project, the principle is the same. The
building site becomes a huge outdoor
assembly yard with teams of workers
as the conveyor belt. A computer system
coordinates the whole operation to
ensure completion targets. Once a core
workforce of skilled building
professionals and tradesmen is
established in Malaysia, they can go
anywhere in the world to train and
supervise unskilled young men as house
assembly workers using video and
computer-aided instruction techniques.
Military Construction Techniques
To build a city in two years requires
a large local labour force making
simultaneous starts on each section of
the city and all finishing at the same
time. This ultra-fast construction
technique is a modern version of the
traditional Army Corp of Engineers’
methods adopted by American
President, Franklin Roosevelt in the
1930s. His ‘New Deal’ giant
infrastructure projects rescued America
from the depression and were continued
worldwide in the post-war years. A
brilliant demonstration of the military
construction technique in its modern
form was the January 2003 completion
and commercial operation of the 30km
Shanghai 450km/hour Magnetic
Levitation railway by Chinese engineers.
The whole project, aptly termed ‘flying
on land’, was completed in
collaboration with the German
manufacturers of Maglev trains in only
two years. The engineering teams
claimed the next Maglev railway in
China, some 300km long, would again
take only two years to complete. Such
is the power of this modernised
construction technique.
The Chinese and German
Governments have now teamed up to
construct Maglev railways throughout
Asia, Europe and the rest of the world.
This is an excellent model for a new
Malaysian export housing industry.
UPM Cool Roof
We have paid special attention to
the difficult problem of cooling
Malaysia’s 1.5 million terrace houses
without resorting to electricity guzzling
air-conditioning. Around 80% of the
heat gain of Malaysian houses comes
through the roof, since the sun is
directly overhead most of the day. This
solar heat must be completely blocked.
Once it gets into the roof space, the hot
air heats up the concrete structure which
retains the heat for most of the night,
turning the house into a ‘sweat box’.
Our invention, UPM Cool Roof - a
highly insulated metal roofing system
which replaces the existing concrete
tiles - is very successful in totally
blocking solar heat gain through the
roof and reduces the thermal discomfort
in the living areas by 70-80% (see UPM
Cool Roof article in Buletin Ingeneur,
March 2002). However, the RM10,000
contractors’ price to renovate a terrace
house has proved to be a barrier. To ease
the burden on house owners and
encourage energy efficiency, we have
proposed a Government-subsidised
dollar for dollar national plan to
renovate two million houses. This makes
sense since the national cost of Cool
Roof renovation (RM22 billion) is no
more than building the extra
hydroelectric power stations otherwise
required for whole house air-
conditioning. The electricity saved
would be colossal. Cool Roof fitted to
new and existing houses will potentially
BULETIN INGENIEUR 36
save Malaysia RM200 billion in air-
conditioning electricity consumption
over 30 years. No country - not even
oil producing countries - can afford to
ignore energy savings of this scale.
Indoor Environment Software
There is a strong financial incentive
to incorporate energy efficiency at the
very early stage of designing new
townships and cities. This means each
house, apartment and commercial
building must be designed for energy
efficiency as a primary requirement. The
classical scientific approach we have
adopted until recently entailed
designing a house and then determining
its energy efficiency in lengthy
temperature data-logging experiments
during different seasons. This classical
method is not only extremely tedious;
it also has severe limitations. It is too
insensitive to detect the effect of small
design changes (such as double glazed
windows) and is quite useless in
designing for different climates. We
switched our major research effort to
computer simulation of the indoor
environment as the only tool that could
accurately answer the ‘what if’
questions - What if we insulate the
walls; what if we install double glazed
windows; what if we introduce a night
time ventilation system? Most
importantly for the architects, M&E
engineers and project managers - what
is the overall effect on energy efficiency
of combining these design parameters
into a new building design and is it
cost-effective?
Successful Validation
The building simulation software we
have adopted comes from 30 years of
work by the Danish Building Research
Institute and was introduced in
Malaysia via our collaborators at the
Technical University of Denmark. The
big task conducted at UPM with our
Danish collaborators over a four-year
period was to generate the Malaysian
‘test reference weather year’ from 21
years of comprehensive climatic data
collected by the Malaysian
Meteorological Office, to then marry the
Malaysian climate with the Danish
indoor environment software, and
finally to validate the Malaysian version
of the software against live temperature
data from a UPM experimental house.
The successful validation of the
Malaysian version of the Danish
BSim2002 indoor climate software after
 environment
all this painstaking work was a great
moment for us, being the first time it
had been achieved by a developing
country. As shown in Figure 1, the
simulated temperature in the living
room (and every other room) of UPM’s
Thermal Comfort House during the
regular March heatwave is extremely
close to the actual temperature obtained
by detailed temperature data-logging
during March 1999. Validations against
an occupied single-storey and a double-
storey house were also successful, but
the accuracy was lower due to lack of
knowledge of the precise social use,
composition and dimensions of these
hand built houses.
Cooling Down Terrace Houses
The validated Malaysian indoor
climate software was put to practical
use by conducting in-depth thermal
comfort simulation study to renovate
1.5 million terrace houses. The designed
aim is to reduce the indoor temperature
to the human thermal comfort zone of
260C to 300C that we have established
for the humid tropics when ceiling fans
are used. The simulated renovations of
a double-storey terrace house are
summarised in Figure 2. The study
clearly establishes the technical
feasibility of cooling down terrace
houses without resorting to air-
conditioning. The maximum indoor
temperature can be reduced to 30.40C
and the occupants stay cool even in the
hottest times of the year, using only the
normal ceiling fans plus a night-time
mechanical ventilation system costing
just RM11 of electricity per month to
operate.
UPM’s computer simulation tool will
therefore be invaluable for devising a
detailed energy efficient national
strategy for cooling down Malaysia’s
two million overheated concrete houses.
Since the complete renovations are
costly, these studies will help decide
which houses in the long term are worth
renovating, and which should be
demolished to make way for parks and
new housing in urban renewal projects.
New Housing Forms For
The Malaysian Climate
Terrace houses originated in Europe
where houses cuddled together help
keep the population warm during the
long, cold winter. In a UPM/Housing
Industry workshop three years ago titled
‘Environment-Friendly Townships For
Developing Countries’, we addressed the
Figure 1
challenge of replacing them with
something more suitable for tropical
climates. Arkitek M. Ghazali in Kuala
Lumpur collaborates with UPM to
translate our social housing and
climatic concepts into commercial
reality. This led to the ‘Quarter-detached
house’ or 4 double-storey terrace
houses, each a corner unit, under one
bungalow type roof (see Figure 3). A
big advantage of this new housing form,
in fact a modern version of the single-
storey ‘cluster house’, is that only the
footprint of the 4-in-1 house needs to
be on level land. Quarter-D houses,
unlike rows of terrace houses, can be
built around the contour of gentle hills
whilst preserving the best trees and
other natural features of the landscape.
Each suburb possesses its unique
environmentally friendly character, as
opposed to terrace housing with its very
monotonous ‘concentration camp’
township design. Arkitek M. Ghazali
claims that Quarter-D houses, with front
and side entrances, can be built to
almost the same density as terrace
housing by doing away with the back
Figure 2
BULETIN INGENIEUR 38
lane, and forecasts
Quarter-D houses and
apartments will become
the major Malaysian
housing form within 10
years.
Thermal Performance
Of Quarter-D
The computer
simulation during the
hottest period in
Malaysia is presented in
Figure 3, which gives the mean monthly
maximum and minimum indoor
temperature in the living room, upstairs
bedrooms and the roof space. The living
spaces remain within the 260C to 300C
thermal comfort zone during the March
heat wave (and also the rest of the year)
without using air-conditioning, even
though the outdoor mean monthly
maximum temperature is 33.70C. The
only additional electricity consumption,
compared with a normal terrace house,
is RM11 per month to run the night time
mechanical ventilation system. There is,
of course, a one-time capital cost in
achieving this superb energy efficiency.
UPM Cool Roof in place of a normal
concrete tile roof adds around RM5,000,
the ventilation system around RM1,000
and perhaps another RM1,000 for
shading the downstairs walls. However,
the owner would otherwise need to
spend almost RM10,000 (four air-
conditionings plus the legally required
3-phase electricity supply) and an
additional RM170 of electricity per
month to achieve a similar level of
thermal comfort.
CONCLUSION
Terrace houses can be made thermally
comfortable but the renovations are
not cheap

Figure 3
A New Discovery
As we were doing these computer
simulations at UPM with three
postgraduate students (energy
engineers) from Denmark, the low
temperature in the Quarter-D house,
particularly the roof space (30.9 0C
compared to 33.70C outdoors) always
seemed too good to be true. We checked
and rechecked our results. We knew
from direct experiments that UPM Cool
Roof completely blocks solar heat gain
but how could the temperature be so
much lower than outdoor ambient? The
reason became apparent when we
realised the roof space of our quarter-
D has a small air volume but a high
thermal mass due to the intersecting
party firewalls. We reasoned that
increasing the thermal mass in the roof
space by increasing the roof height and
replacing the lightweight ceiling with
a concrete ceiling would drop the
temperature still lower. Indeed it did,
by 1.20C (and the bedrooms by 0.60C).
The maximum temperature in the roof
space dropped to 29.30C to become the
coolest, rather than the hottest part of
the house. The roof space of a normal
terrace house reaches 500C during a heat
wave and, given Malaysia’s high
humidity, will cause death from heat
stroke within 20 minutes. Instead, the
Quarter-D loft space becomes very
comfortable living space, some 250sf,
with 6-feet headroom, considerably
larger in fact than most master
bedrooms and appealing to teenagers.
Instead of providing extra land on the
side of the house for future renovations,
architects can expand upwards to create
a fourth bedroom at a low cost per
environment
referencing with known test reference
weather years in other countries. China
is now developing faster than any other
country in the world and has embarked
on an energy efficiency programme for
the whole country. The construction of
the 1200km Shanghai-to-Beijing
Maglev freight and passenger railway
is on the drawing board and will cut
the travelling time to just three hours.
The super-fast railway will open up a
development corridor along which new
townships, cities, factories and intensive
agriculture will evolve. This coincides
with the ‘Asian Landbridge’ concept,
long advocated by American economist
Lyndon LaRouche in his plan for
peaceful development and
transformation of the world as the only
sane alternative to wars and Depression
square foot, and thereby recover the (see www.larouchpub.com).
extra capital cost of making the house Government to Government
thermally comfortable. So, our collaboration between Malaysia and
computer simulation technique has China to build energy efficient cities
enabled us to discover a practical way along the Shanghai-Beijing
of incorporating our cool house development corridor is futuristic but
technology into new houses at no extra technically feasible.
cost. We feel that our new technology
can now be adopted by developers. Energy Simulations For China
As an exercise to test our new
Energy Efficient Housing For simulation tool in cold climates, we
Shanghai And Beijing located the Quarter-D in Shanghai and
At UPM, we are now well advanced Beijing and optimised their design for
in applying simulation technology to energy efficient thermal comfort. These
any climate on earth, thanks to Swiss cities experience a warm to hot summer
researchers who have invented a way (mean daily temperature in Shanghai
to generate meteorological data for in July is 280C) and a cold winter (mean
developing countries by cross- daily temperature in Beijing during
Table 1
CHINA HEATING REQUIREMENTS
2
 - storey Quarter-detached house (110m2)
for 20oC downstairs temperature
Heating load (kWhr/month)
Month
Shanghai Beijing
May 0 0
Jun 0 0
Jul 0 0
Aug 0 0
Sep 0 0
Oct 0 0
Nov 193 712
Dec 499 1173
Jan 744 1379
Feb 582 1014
Mar 362 612
Apr 106 134
Summer 0 0
Winter 2486 5023
All Year 2486 5023
B U L E T I N I N G E N I E U R 39
 environment

January is -3 0 C). The computer
simulations quantified the advantages
of not only insulating the roof but also
the external walls and particularly the
ground slab. Double glazed windows, a
low air infiltration rate and a night time
ventilation system for the summer
months were also found to be beneficial.
To minimise heating costs, a minimum
socially acceptable temperature of 200C
Figure 4
Figure 5
Table 2
BAHRAIN COOLING REQUIREMENTS
2
 - storey Quarter-detached house (110m2)
Sector 30oC indoor temperature
was assumed for the living room, but
the bedrooms were not heated. A 3kW
electric heater was located in the living
room to maintain a temperature of 200C
and to take the chill off the bedrooms.
The minimum simulated temperature in
the Shanghai living room throughout
the year was 200C, in the bedrooms 160C
and in the loft bedroom 140C. The
corresponding minimum temperatures
for Beijing were: living
room 200C, bedrooms 140C
and loft bedroom 110C. By
using a night time
mechanical ventilation
system in the hottest
months in Shanghai and
Beijing, the simulated
temperature in the houses
never exceeded 290C.
Based on this thermal
performance, Table 1 shows
the overall heating
requirements by month and
year for the optimised 21/2-
storey Quarter-D in both
Shanghai and Beijing. The
110m2 4-bedroom houses
were highly energy
efficient, requiring a
heating of only 23 kWhr/
m2/year in Shanghai and
46 kWhr/m 2/year in the
colder Beijing climate. In
terms of Malaysian
electricity prices, the
houses can be kept
acceptably warm for an
average price of RM52 per month in
Shanghai and RM105 per month in
Beijing. When combined with
simulations of the other energy
requirements such as lighting, cooking
and household appliances, the total
energy efficiency of the house can be
obtained. By summing up all the
dwellings, the total residential energy
demand of a new city can therefore be
compiled month by month with
considerable accuracy.
The Bahrain Challenge
The RM700 million public housing
project in Bahrain is still ‘on the lookout
for a credible Malaysian contractor’. Of
course, the housing form must suit the
Arab culture, but purely as an example,
we have located our Quarter-D in the
Bahrain desert climate with peak August
temperatures of 42 0 C. We have
optimised the design to reduce the
otherwise horrendous air-conditioning
electricity bill.
The modified house requires a 2 hp
air-conditioning downstairs and 1hp in
each of the three bedrooms. The
maximum indoor temperature was set
at 30 0C but the attic (roof space)
bedroom was not air-conditioned. The
daily temperature profiles for the living
room during the hottest month (August)
and the coolest month (January) are
shown in Figure 4 and Figure 5,
compared with the outdoor temperature.
The monthly electricity consumption is
shown in Table 2, giving an air-
conditioning cooling load of 62kWhr/
m 2 /year. Based on the Malaysian
electricity price, the Quarter-D designed
for the Bahrain climate can be kept
within the human thermal zone for an
average cost of RM143 per month.

Month Air-cond load Malaysian electricity cost

(kWhr/month) (RM per month) Conclusion
Jan 0 0 Armed with the energy efficient
Feb 0 0 thermal comfort technology described
in this article, together with
Mar 19 5
industrialised building systems and
Apr 201 50
Government backing, the Malaysian
May 784 198
housing industry is technically
Jun 1137 284
capable of becoming a fast track
Jul 1391 348
Township and City Builder for
Aug 1438 359
developing countries. BEM
Sep 1145 288
Oct 805 151
Nov 124 31
Dec 3 1 For further information, email
All Year 8848 mohd_peter@hotmail.com or
Cooling load 82 kWhr/m2 Year contact Centre for Thermal Comfort
Mean per month RM143 Studies, UPM at 012-335 1938.

BULETIN INGENIEUR 40