Robustness of residential houses in Ecuador in the face of global warming: Prototyping and simulation studies in the Amazon, coastal and Andes macroclimatic regions

Ecuador is starting to consider climate change as a priority for the country development. Recently, was
founded the Sub-secretariat for climate change, and many Ministry started to insert related topic in the
political agenda. Particularly, Urban Development and Housing Ministry, MIDUVI, launched in 2011
the competition “Dwellings for climate change” in order to improve the basic social house that is still
constructing in all the climates of the country. For instance, Ecuador, even small, has a unique climatic
diversity: in the Andes the climate is tropical mountain, in the Amazons is tropical wet and in the
Coast is hot, both arid and humid, depending on the specific position. One of the competition goals
was to put in evidence the need of different design for each climate, even for social dwellings, that
have to be very cheap. The National Institute of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (INER) is
also developing some prototypes for the different climates of Ecuador [1]. In this paper, a simulation
study has been conducted in order to estimate the discomfort hours (both undercooling and
overheating) that inhabitants could feel in the base case (the actual MIDUVI social house) and in the
three competition winner prototypes. Simulations have been conducted for the climate of nowadays
(Typical Meteorological Year –TMY) and for the future (2050 and 2080) taking into account the
global warming effect under the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) A2 scenario.
Because of in Ecuador heating and air-conditioning systems are used only by a small part of the
population (the richer one), the analysis was conducted thinking in naturally ventilated buildings,
searching for the total discomfort hours during the year.