Examination of energy effıcient utilization of rural houses using cost and benefit analysis: Example of Gümüşköy/Aydın

Rural housing is a type of building constructed with local construction techniques using natural resources and materials found in rural areas. Many of the rural houses currently in use have been built many years ago. Most of these dwellings were built by the homeowners, neighbors or relatives living in the vicinity by using traditional methods and building materials in the vicinity. As a result of the preference of local building materials in the region, there are rural houses built by using different materials in different regions of Turkey. Referring to TUIK data, there are 153.726 masonry rural houses built between the years of 1992-2018 in Turkey which 91 percent of these houses are masonry houses with brick walls. Due to the high production rate of masonry houses that were built by using brick, masonry houses with brick walls located in Gümüşkoy district of Aydın were discussed within the scope of the thesis. Since rural houses are generally built with low budgets and limited possibilities, issues such as insulation and energy conservation are ignored in such houses. Therefore, the energy loss in these houses is quite high. In this study, it is aimed to determine the improvement methods that can be applied to rural houses in order to reduce the energy need of houses, to support the energy production of the houses and to improve the quality of life of the users, and to make suggestions about which improvements would be more beneficial by using comparative cost and benefit analysis method. Ten different improvement works have been proposed for masonry brick rural houses in Gümüşköy region. Costs were collected from companies for each of these studies and the benefits of each study were determined. The proposed improvement studies were compared using the cost-benefit analysis method. In the light of the data obtained as a result of this study, it is suggested to use a similar process to different types of buildings that need improvement works by taking benefit-cost analysis results into consideration. Keywords: Rural housing, sustainability, cost-benefit analysis