2024, Uncategorized, Weather, Words

Climate Control

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I work in a two story office building that was converted from an open design with few walls or offices to a labyrinth of cubicles and offices to meet the needs of our agency. I have a lovely office with a window. It is the most uncomfortable place I have ever worked.

When all the walls were put in to replace the open concept that the previous company had, the contractor had to also put in a heating and cooling system for each new work space. There are several different heating and cooling zones on each floor, each with its own thermostat and heater/cooler. It is unfortunate that the contractor didn’t make a schematic of what offices were in which climate zones. It appears that some of the upstairs offices are on some of the downstairs thermostats. It is impossible to control the heat and cooling. No matter what the thermostats are set at, they each stay at 70 degrees, while the office temperatures are sometimes in the lower 60’s or upper 50’s.

My office is usually freezing. The office across the hall from me is usually too hot. I have two ceiling vents, and we suspect they are on different thermostats. The day it was 108 outside last week, I had my space heater on and was wrapped in a shawl while I worked at my desk. Many of my coworkers have space heaters they use on a daily basis. The temperature control is no better in the winter. None of the windows can be opened, so we can’t cool or heat using outside air either.

What is the best/worst work environment you ever had? Are you usually too hot or too cold?

44 thoughts on “Climate Control”

  1. I’ve never had anything as dire are you office situation but in most of my cubicle life I’ve either had a little space heater and a little fan. I lost both when my building burnt down before pandemic After that, I didn’t replace the space heater (no, the fire was not caused by a space heater – it was an exploding cell phone) but I did go out and get a new little fan the next week after they had re-located all of us to a different building.

    I grew up in a very hot and humid place and couldn’t wait to escape; spent many childhood vacations in WI/MN and knew that’s where I wanted to be. I would always prefer to be cold rather than to be hot.

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      1. Luckily the gal whose phone exploded had come in early that day. It kind of exploded while sitting on her desk and the sparks hit the fabric of the cube wall and it was like dry tinder. There were probably eight or nine people in the building at that time and they all got out easily but the fire just took over. So the building was pretty much toasted they ended up basically gutting it and redoing it. And of course this was in the fall before pandemic so by the time we got back into the building, it was 2021. The main takeaway for most of us was that only one person in that group in the building had known where a fire extinguisher was. You got to believe me when we got back into the building three years later we all looked for where the fire singers were before we even went to our cubes.

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  2. Wow, Renee – is there NOTHING to be done? I suppose it would take gutting the place and starting over.

    I think the best workspace I’ve experienced with the Kindergarten room at Half Moon Bay Elementary. Northern Calif. coastal climate (foggy in a.m., usually burned off by noon, rainy in the fall). No heat or cooling issues. Spacious room with plenty of windows – it had formerly been the Art Room. Decent sized storage closet/office space. And of course the small sized bathroom fixtures.

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  5. In 1994, after moving our software company 3 times and finally hiring a 3rd employee, my partner and I bought a 1 acre corner plot in an underappreciated would-be upscale office park on the rural side of town, where we built a moderately upscale 2500 sq ft ranch-style office building. Italian tile floors, cherry stained trim, very nice bathrooms. I’d post a photo if I could. We were prosperous. It shows.

    There I made myself a large office, with big windows, a cherry office ensemble, a Victorian-inspired sofa, antique lamps, etc, on a patio, where I could enjoy the 17 river birch trees we’d planted along a landscaped swale.

    Our staff grew to 6. I took naps in the afternoon. When I retired from the business, it wasn’t hard to leave the work, but I grieved the office.

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    1. When my dad was at his most prosperous as an attorney, he and my mom (who was at that stage to the office manager) bought a house for his practice and completely revamped it. They put in a little parking lot and the main entrance was actually on the basement level. They did glass all the way up three stories on one side and they put in an elevator and a little shower on the lower floor in case — well who knows in case what. Anyway, my dad‘s office was on the top floor and he actually borrowed art from people a couple of times because he didn’t want to have to look at the same art year in and year out. it was a beautiful building.

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  6. My construction career put me in many uncomfortable temperature conditions. One notable one was a remodel of the air traffic control building on the Grand Forks, ND Airport. Middle of summer. No air conditioning. No windows. 101 degrees inside. My boss just laughed it off and told us about how he kept cool while working military projects in Panama. “Dip your shirt in the Canal and put it back on.” There was no working plumbing for water so he brought a chest of ice water. Evaporation works but only for a short while then must be repeated.

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    2. I am not in any way, shape or form taking away from your horrible experience Wes. But did anybody else read that book about the building of the Panama Canal by McCullough? That sounded absolutely brutal.

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  7. One way to figure out the climate zones at my workplace would be to remove all the ceiling tiles to track which thermostats are connected to which vents. They also have talked about turning the whole system off, and then turning on each thermostat one at a time to see which offices get air through the vents each time.

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      1. Well, we have a landlord who just doesn’t see the problem. The State rents buildings and doesn’t buy them, so we are at the mercy of the landlord.

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  9. Worst work environment, and I’ve talked about this before, was when in college I worked pumping gas at a 24-hour full service gas station. It was midwinter and a weekend and I was working a night shift because I had classes during the day. The temperature that night was subzero. Enough traffic was coming into the station that I was outside pumping gas almost continually that night. I was shivering so hard I lost more than five pounds in a single night.

    Best work environment, and this was just an episode, was when I was working in advertising. We were in L. A. Shooting a television commercial for Northwest Airlines and we had engaged Peter Lawford to star in the commercial which was being filmed in Long Beach. As an adjunct to the commercial, I had hired a Los Angeles photographer to shoot stills for newspaper ads.
    In the preparation for shooting the commercial, we were entertained by the production company, spending time at their offices in the Hollywood hills and taken for an evening cruise around the marina in the director’s 40-foot teakwood boat. At the conclusion of the commercial shoot, the photographer wanted to show me his studio and his portfolio. That entailed a drive down Sunset Boulevard in his silver Mercedes convertible. It was all a little surreal.

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  10. Rise and Shine, Baboons,

    Some of you saw my Highland Park offices years ago. That upper floor had a fatal flaw with the heating/cooling. The main thermostat was located in another office suite. The thermostat in our offices did not operate heating/cooling in our suite. The suite where our thermostat was located was often cold, so the occupant of that office, unbeknownst to anyone, brought in a space heater. The warmth produced by that told the thermostat that it was warm enough, turning off the heat. There was no heat anywhere else in that upper level and we froze. Finally, the landlord did some problem-solving and found the offending space heater, which was then banned. That helped, but what a dysfunctional system.

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  11. When you see construction people with lamp shade-like contraptions going around from vent to vent, those are the air balancing folks. If done properly, they should be able to identify problems and provide solutions.

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  12. I’ve been laughing at the temperature disparities in Paris. The badminton players spend a lot of time wiping themselves down with towels. The swimmers stand on the podium to get their medals wearing coats.

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  13. I don’t remember ever working in a place that didn’t have balanced heating/cooling. It always just seemed like it was too warm in one area or too cold somewhere else. Even the home I worked in at the end of my career had weird places where it was too warm or cold. Two bedrooms toward the rear of the home were usually too cool. They were bedrooms for people who needed full care and were in the beds frequently. It was hard to keep those rooms warm in the winter. Their nearby bathroom, however, was very warm. The other two bedrooms were fairly well-regulated. The kitchen and dining areas were usually too warm, while the living area was too cool.

    I am always too hot. I’m rarely cold. My house is vertical so the rules regarding temperatures apply. Warm air rises and cool air falls. In the summer, I close and cover all of the heating vents on the main floor and in the basement so the cool air is forced all the way upstairs. I also run the fan continuously to circulate the cool air. It’s always very cool in the basement and very warm upstairs where the bedrooms are. That’s not ideal for me. It works the opposite way in the winter. I close the vents upstairs and open them all downstairs. I let the heat rise naturally and that works fairly well. It’s just hard to cool this place. Also, it faces south and has large windows. I keep the curtains/shades drawn when it’s hot. It gets really, really hot on my deck and that heat will just warm up my house too much. I actually use more electricity cooling my house than I do heating it.

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  16. I made a grammatically incorrect error in my post that changes its meaning. I meant to say that I’ve never worked in a place that had balanced heating or cooling – not that they all did.

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  18. Way OT, but I accidentally discovered the original lyrics of Take Me Oyut to the Ballgame, which was about a woman.

    Katie Casey was base ball mad.
    Had the fever and had it bad;
    Just to root for the home town crew,
    Ev’ry sou Katie blew.
    On a Saturday, her young beau
    Called to see if she’d like to go,
    To see a show but Miss Kate said,
    “No, I’ll tell you what you can do.”
    “Take me out to the ball game,
    Take me out with the crowd.
    Buy me some peanuts and cracker jack,
    I don’t care if I never get back,
    Let me root, root, root for the home team,
    If they don’t win it’s a shame.
    For it’s one, two, three strikes, you’re out,
    At the old ball game.”

    Katie Casey saw all the games,
    Knew the players by their first names;
    Told the umpire he was wrong,
    All along good and strong.
    When the score was just two to two,
    Katie Casey knew what to do,
    Just to cheer up the boys she knew,
    She made the gang sing this song:

    “Take me out to the ball game,
    Take me out with the crowd.
    Buy me some peanuts and cracker jack,
    I don’t care if I never get back,
    Let me root, root, root for the home team,
    If they don’t win it’s a shame.
    For it’s one, two, three strikes, you’re out,
    At the old ball game.”

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  19. there is a minnesota company that exists just to help fix these issues. they won the minnesota cup 10 years ago and are wonderful
    i remember a guy i met years ago who worked for a commercial real estate company that paid for many buildings they bought by fixing heating cooling and electrical costs like lighting and the reduced costs were so huge it was mind boggeling
    my moms retirement co-op has 9 floors with 50 rooms per floor and they are all too hot or too cold
    she has to leave her windows open in the winter because otherwise its way too hot. but if they turn the heat down ( hers is off all winter) its cold elsewhere
    my house today is messed up but landlord cant figure it out
    i think there is a huge opportunity for the energy saving companies to create a win win.
    i am lucky enough to be comfortable in hot and cold until it hits extreme. i am like a lobster in boiling water. its ok if you do it gradually. i have heat blasting and ac blasting and alone its fine if there is a passanger its pointed out that im not paying attention as they sweat or freeze with the
    vent things blowing intense climate but unless the white sound is overpowering the music i dont notice

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