HOT enough for you?
No, seriously, is it? Then it’s probably too cold for your co-worker, who, if you haven’t noticed, is wearing a parka indoors. In July.
Now that we’re in the trenches of summer, the annual battle of the thermostat is raging in office buildings all over the city.
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“My boss insists that the air-conditioning be set to freezing at all times. I turn it off, he turns it on,” rants Mary, who works in publishing (and would like to keep her job, so we’re giving her a fake name).
“I currently have a piece of cardboard taped over the vent in my office,” she says, “but last year, he noticed that and said that then it somehow throws off the system and makes it warmer in his office and made me take it down.”
Jennifer Louie, who works for UGO Entertainment, says she and the people around her regularly dress for a different season than the one outside.
“I have a blanket I put over my legs,” she says. “Everyone has extra clothes they throw on when they’re here. I have to go outside to thaw out!”
Alexandra, who also works in a Manhattan office, has a more inventive solution to the chill: “I obsessively chew wads of gum,” she says. “Somehow chewing makes me feel warmer. I also drink hot things.”
But for every tale of frozen woe, there’s an equal and opposite complaint about excessive sweatiness. Steve Lee, an architecture professor at Carnegie Mellon University, has studied HVAC (heating, ventilating and air conditioning) systems extensively, and says the hots and the colds are locked in a never-ending struggle.
“Data shows that the number-one complaint is ‘It’s too hot,’ and number-two is ‘too cold,’ ” he says. “The problem is, the traditional American engineering approach is ‘one temperature suits all.’ They calculate the percentage of people dissatisfied, and they figure they’ve done a fantastic job if only 20 percent of people are dissatisfied. It’s bizarre.”
Lee gave us a little air-conditioning 101, and what we learned wasn’t pretty. The way most systems work, he explains, is by mixing outside air and refrigerated air and delivering it through the same duct – so that when the AC gets turned off, so does your fresh air source. “When the thermostat says it’s getting too cool, it cuts off the flow of air. That’s the air you need to breathe. So as the space heats up, CO2 builds up from breathing so you get sleepy and sick.”
No wonder it feels so stuffy (which, incidentally, is the number-three complaint).
Help may be on the way, though; a newer and more efficient system circulates chilled water to cool the air instead. But there are drawbacks in these buildings, as well: “My office is freezing 24/7,” says Jon Solomon, who works at Princeton radio station WPRB. “I have the room set to 90 and it is still chilly. This system works too well, in my opinion.”
Some say we wouldn’t need all this drastic refrigeration in the first place if people would just slim down a bit. Renee Grant-Williams, a vocal coach and former New Yorker, is a longtime crusader against excessive AC, and thinks it’s directly linked to obesity. “My assistant was 45 pounds overweight, which she has since lost, and she used to complain about how warm it was in summer,” she says. “Now she complains about how cold it is.”
Mary, the disgruntled publisher, couldn’t agree more. “Because it’s freezing all of the time, our bodies are tricked into thinking we’re headed into a long winter and are then triggered to want to load up on calories to develop a fat layer to stay warm,” she theorizes.
“My boss most certainly does not need the extra calories,” she adds. “I’m feeling mean today. Maybe it’s because freezing my a – – off makes me bitchy!”
But perhaps the worst discovery of all was the dirty trick used by some frustrated building managers whose tenants just won’t shut up. Turns out a little psychology is a lot cheaper than calling in a maintenance team.
“When there are a lot of complaints that come in, they’ll have a fake thermostat with double-stick tape they put on the wall,” says Professor Lee. “Research shows complaints go down immediately when people have a little dial on the wall.”