Exploring key factors impacting cooling usage patterns of Chinese urban household based on a large-scale questionnaire survey

With rapid urbanization and climate change, the demand for cooling in Chinese urban residential buildings is creating a great challenge for the energy efficiency and carbon emission reduction targets of China. However, there is lack of information to track the changes in cooling patterns of Chinese urban households and little research to reveal factors relating with cooling behavior. This has become barriers for China's green and efficient action plan on cooling. Therefore, this research conducted a national-wide online questionnaire survey across China, and try to explore the cooling usage pattern change in urban households and factors impacting this change. By comparative analysis, correlation analysis and Jonckheere-Terpstra test on surveyed result, conclusions concerning changes in cooling patterns and the essential influential factors were obtained. Single-split AC has replaced fans to be the primary cooling appliance in urban residential buildings. Cooling usage behavior distribution in urban Chinese household is “part time part space mode”, but has shifted from less intensive ones to more intensive ones. But most importantly, cooling usage behavior is correlated with cooling device choice. Policy implications to promote efficient split ACs and energy saving behavior in urban residential buildings were provided accordingly.