Survey Research on Living Environment and Energy Consumption in the West Rural Areas of China

In-situ questionnaire survey was done on living environment, heat insulation performance of envelopes and energy consumption in the west provinces-the poorest places of China. Survey results show that indoor temperature is very high in summer and very low in winter, so indoor environment is very bad and thereby has poor liveability in the rural areas of the China west. Moreover, the health of occupants is threatened due to poor air quality polluted by the livestock breeding, toilet sanitation, kitchen stove and so on. And there are poor heat insulation performances of envelopes, and even windows and doors have high heat conductivity coefficient and poor seal. If indoor thermal environment gains the same indoor comfort level with the urban buildings, energy consumption would increase more 3 similar to 5 times. Energy consumption survey shows that the base number of present rural energy consumption, which is very low, is 20% of urban energy consumption, but the rural buildings have the rapidly rising potential. (C) 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).