Capacity of traditional fireplaces (ocaks) to meet the current heating loads within the reuse of historical houses: Examples from Southwest Anatolia

Traditional fireplaces (ocaks), which have been commonly utilized in Anatolian historical buildings, possess functional values in addition to their aesthetic significance. Specifying the thermal properties of these elements is an evaluation field, which assists in determining the extent of the interventions that are undertaken to sustain the thermal comfort for contemporary reuse of historical houses. The aim of this study is to determine the potential of traditional ocaks to meet the thermal needs depending on contemporary utilization scenarios. The studied building type is open-hall (sofa) historical houses. The method of the study consists of collecting annual on-site thermal readings on two cases from rural and urban settlements, determining the thermophysical properties of construction materials used in these buildings and modeling the buildings on DesignBuilder v5.4.0.21 software for conducting their transient thermal analyses after calibrating the models. The changing values of spatial heating energy rate demands were calculated by analyses, were compared to the maximum heating powers of the ocaks in the chosen case buildings and the demand fulfillment rate of the ocaks were calculated. The presented analysis stages aim to contribute to the methodology of heating system evaluations for historical houses. As a result of this study, it was determined that two of the three ocaks in urban case are highly satisfactory for their corresponding spaces however one lacks this high-level of sufficiency, and all analyzed ocaks in rural case have adequate heating levels. Thus, data were generated to determine the scope of possible heating arrangements to be designed in the examined buildings.