Date: Wed, 28 Sep 2016 20:37:51 -0400 From: Benjamin Kaduk To: sipb-office CC: Madars Virza Subject: Re: Office temperature and blankets I guess this is shame on jhawk and me for not actually writing _Inessential Office Temperature Management_ like we promised. Or maybe just shame on me, now. Before I go any further, let met start by noting that the office is not a small chunk of air and other stuff, and as such has a significant thermal mass. Any sort of adjustments made to various thermostats and other controls will probably take a couple hours to re-equilibrate, so usually it's best to only make small adjustments. ("The office is 64F" is probably not such a time, of course.) Anyway, there are at least three factors that may be involved in the temperature of the office: the overhead fan-coil units (brownish boxes hanging below the ceiling with chilled water pipes feeding them), the perimeter fan-coil units against the windows, and the overhead forced air vents. The overhead fan-coil units are the only ones over which we have direct/local control, and unfortunately, they only ever supply cooling. They're what the on/off (rotary) switch and thermostat by the door control. Having the thermostat to 80 will only ensure that those don't start pumping out cold(er) air. The perimter fan-coil units have local thermostats (open the access panels on top, to either side of the actual vents, and some of the mixing valves have a silver dial that controls the temperature; there are also fan speed switches here) as well as fan controls. Unfortunately, the perimeter units are a two-pipe system (one supply, one return), so they will either be in heating mode or cooling mode, and that's a building-wide control. I've gotten various stories over the years, but it tends to be something like "they don't go into heating mode until the outside temperature drops below 60F [for some period of time]". It used to be the case that one of the perimeter units' thermostat was installed with the sense reversed (i.e., turning it towards 'colder' actually made the set point warmer), but the thermostat has been replaced since I was a regular office denizen, so that may have changed. Once you know which mode the building is in, it's pretty easy to figure out experimentally, though. If I remember correctly, there's only about 70 degrees of arc of freedom of motion on those thermostats -- moving them to the stop on either side will give you a sense for the approximate set point of the thermostat. The fan speed switch has a 'low' and 'high' setting, but you can balance the switch in the central position for "off". If the perimeter units are still in cooling mode, definitely put those fans to "off". The third main mechanism for effecting temperature control in the office is the overhead forced air. This is controlled centrally by Facilities, and has the unfortunate property that the control affecting us also affects the entire half of the floor, which used to be a library (and as such is still a single thermal zone). So, if we're freezing but the cluster is burning up, someone is going to be sad. If the office is cold and the cluster is also cold, it's worth a call to the Facilities dispatcher (usually I would go straight to x3-1500 and skip the F-IXIT phone tree) and ask them about the temperature; they should have remote sensors and will probably be amenable to upping the set-point a few degrees. I want to say that we are AH-9 (air handler), but don't quote me on that. If all else fails, there's always the option of spinning the CPU on the office heads ... there's got to be at least a kilowatt of heating capacity there :) -Ben