The current socio-economic conditions of social housing neighborhoods in Portugal, where people generally don't have heating or cooling habits, determines the adoption of passive retrofitting strategies. A social housing neighborhood in Porto, Portugal, named "Bairro de Lordelo", with 4 blocks, 179 dwellings and more than 400 inhabitants was recently retrofitted. The retrofitting investment was strictly limited to a maximum value per dwelling and involved the inclusion of thermal insulation in roofs, replacement of windows, and renovation of the ventilation systems. It's main goal was to increase thermal comfort, in a context of inexistence of any heating or cooling systems installed. An indoor climate measurement program was developed for the months of July, August and September of 2012, and the months of December 2012, January and February 2013, in order to evaluate, respectively, summer and winter thermal comfort of the dwellings. The experimental measurements were carried out in 24 dwellings - 4 of the dwellings were measured during the 3 months and the other 20 in periods of 2 and 3 weeks-. The study is focused on the importance of the variability of the vertical and horizontal alignment of an apartment and its occupation, for a certain measurement period, on the indoor air temperature and in the thermal comfort of the occupants, according to adaptive models presented in EN15251 and using some descriptive statistics. As a final result it is expected that its influence can be up to 4 degrees C on the indoor air temperature. (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/).
