Citation: Aldersoni, A.; Albaker, A.; Alturki, M.; Said, M.A. The Impact of Passive Strategies on the Overall Energy Performance of Traditional Houses in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Buildings 2022, 12, 1837. https://doi.org/10.3390/buildings 12111837 Academic Editors: Gerardo Maria Mauro and Costantino Menna Received: 26 September 2022 Accepted: 27 October 2022 Published: 1 November 2022 Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affil- iations. Copyright: © 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/). buildings Article The Impact of Passive Strategies on the Overall Energy Performance of Traditional Houses in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia Ali Aldersoni 1, *, Abdullah Albaker 2 , Mansoor Alturki 2 and Mohamed Ahmed Said 1 1 Department of Architecture Engineering, College of Engineering, University of Ha’il, Ha’il 81451, Saudi Arabia 2 Department of Electrical Engineering, College of Engineering, University of Ha’il, Ha’il 81451, Saudi Arabia * Correspondence: a.aldersoni@uoh.edu.sa; Tel.: +966-555-166-026 Abstract: Communities in nations all over the world must work to address the problem of energy consumption, which has emerged in modern times. Given that domestic consumers account for roughly 49% of the total electricity used annually by all sectors, buildings can be seen as a key player in this conundrum. The architecture field can therefore play a vital role in saving energy, not only through building design but also through the materials used. To minimize architectural programmes’ negative impact on the environment, sustainable design that saves energy is being employed today in traditional Saudi Arabian buildings. This study examined whether current housing designs can effectively integrate four key passive energy-saving strategies: outdoor green area, thermal mass wall, window-to-wall ratio and shading device. This study analysed two types of traditional houses from two different cities in Saudi Arabia’s Najd region, Riyadh and Hail, examining the four passive strategies. Using traditional house designs, this paper created four simulation models for each house, and compared the simulation results with the base case model to determine how well these strategies could affect the energy consumption for residential buildings in Saudi Arabia (KSA). The results indicate that the selected strategies can play an important role in saving energy in residential buildings in the KSA. Keywords: traditional house; passive strategies; energy consumption; thermal mass; window-to-wall ratio (WWR) 1. Introduction The global trend to reduce the consumption of energy includes a broad range of fields, including the domestic, industrial, commercial, government, and agricultural sectors. Among these, the domestic sector is known as the highest consumer of energy. Domestic consumption constituted 47.58 percent of all power consumed in 2020, with industrial use making up 20.0 percent, followed by commercial use (14.2 percent), preceded by gov- ernment use (12.51 percent), and then other uses (25.7 percent) [1]. This situation can be improved by reducing the negative impact on the environment produced by implementing architectural programmes and integrating sustainable design. However, these ideas and objectives are not new to the field of architectural design, since vernacular architecture is frequently directed towards the successful integration of buildings into the surround- ing natural environment. In Saudi Arabia, almost all traditional houses in each area are constructed based on the local environment and the surrounding structures [2] by segre- gating among themselves through elements such as form, scale, and measurements of the buildings, the types of materials used, and homogeneity with the surrounding environ- ment. Therefore, traditional buildings in Saudi Arabia are a good example of traditional architecture today that can participate in saving energy [3]. Buildings 2022, 12, 1837. https://doi.org/10.3390/buildings12111837 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/buildings