Initial Study of Solar Control Film in a Hotel Guest Room in Winter

Abstract

In recent years, energy-efficient facilities have prevailed in the Hong Kong and China markets. Many of these facilities claim to generate considerable energy and money savings. Hoteliers, however, find that there is a lack of independent and local studies about energy performance and its related financial savings and environmental improvement brought by those facilities, such as heat pumps, solar-control film on the window, sensor and dimmer for lighting control, etc. Nevertheless, there is a lack of reliable and independent data about the energy performance and economic viability of the solar-control film applied in a real environment. In many situations, consumers are only given the laboratory's result of this energy saving facility. Research was carried out in summer to estimate its positive effect on energy saving. There is also a paucity of experiments conducted in winter to show its negative effect in cold weather. This study carries out an experiment in hotel guest rooms in winter in order to estimate the energy and lighting performance of solar-control film in winter. This experiment was conducted when the illuminance under 1000lux, the average visible light transmittance for the film was 49.8%, and with very low solar radiation being transmitted into indoor environment. Under these situations, the study found that the effect of solar energy passing through the film coating in the guest room can be neglected. Instead, the film can act as a layer to prevent heat to transmit to the outdoors, just like the greenhouse effect.