*fans self*

[arethinn]

Ugh. It's 84 degrees in here. This is only sort of a problem with the climate control -- more a problem in the whole design of the thing, than a simple question of "isn't the air conditioning on?" I'm told that the a/c is not controllable room by room in this building; it's at best floor by floor. And in any case it's not something we can turn a dial on a thermostat for. I don't think there even is any thermostat. I'm told the heating/cooling is on a calendar, not actually dependent on how hot or cold it is in the room. Because our 90 computers and people sitting in front of them all day produce so much heat, it gets much hotter much faster in here than anywhere else in the building, especially when the weather outside goes above 70 degrees (it's quicker to get warmer in here than anywhere else).

In other words, the cooling is adequate everywhere else but can't keep up with the heat we generate, yet there's no way to make it try to keep just this room cooler. We have electric fans, but they only help so much. Can't even open a bloody window, since we're in the basement. (Even if we weren't, no modern office-type building -- this one was built in 1996 -- is built with openable windows, anyway. Distance Learning, upstairs, often stands their back door open to get flow-through.) In the summer quarter we leave about half the lab computers off as much as possible, so their CRTs aren't heating up the room, but that's not practical during the academic year, especially two weeks before finals (which is what this week is).

Oh, by the way, apparently OSHA (or whoever) has nothing to say about it until it reaches the hundreds, despite the fact that someone once passed out in similar conditions (~90 degrees) in the main library a number of years ago. So we get to suffer because it doesn't break code. Blerg.

Comments

[twopiearr.livejournal.com]

What you need to do is find some superhot vixen who owes community service to go on an extended campaign to...erm...'persuade' some corporate big wigs to give you a nice big donation of LCD (read: vastly lower heat generating) monitors :)

[starlightforest.livejournal.com]

Hehe. A row of them do already have them - they were bought later than the rest of the lab, and LCD panels had become standard for that package from Dell, or something. Buying 66 more... ech. (the G4's already have them and the iMacs are, well, iMacs) Superhot vixens are in short supply around here.

[soundwave106.livejournal.com]

You'll just have to convince someone that the lower electricity cost would be worth it then. (LCDs use about half the electricity that CRTs do I think.)