A new method to improve indoor environment: Combining the living wall with air-conditioning

Indoor plants can improve indoor thermal environment, relieve the anxiety, and reduce the CO2 concentration especially in enclosed rooms with air-conditioning and heating. However, owing to the space limitation and the light requirement, it is very difficult to maintain traditional large-scale plantings indoors. To improve indoor planting efficiency and thermal environment, the living wall was introduced to be combined with airconditioning. Two identical rooms were built to analyze the efficiency of combining a living wall with airconditioning. One room contained a living wall and air-conditioning, while the other room only with airconditioning was served as a reference. The indoor thermal environment and CO2 concentration were monitored, while the 64 participants were questioned to display their subjective feelings in two rooms. The results showed that combining the living wall lowered the relative humidity by 2.6%, maintained the indoor air speed at 0.20 m/s~0.30 m/s and reduced the CO2 concentration by approximately 10%, while it increased the uniformity of these environmental parameters. The average skin temperature in the room with the living wall was 0.2 C higher than that in the referred room and closer to the neutral mean skin temperature. The living wall significantly improved the subjective evaluation on indoor environment, especially in air movement and air freshness, with the thermal comfort level from 0.13 (Slightly higher than Neutral (0) ) to 0.73 (Slightly lower than Comfortable (+1) ).

Automated summary

Combining a living wall with air-conditioning can improve the indoor thermal environment, reduce CO2 concentration, and enhance subjective evaluation on indoor environment.