I’ve never worked anyplace where we had any meaningful control over the thermostat. The damn things are either completely inaccessible, or locked tighter 'n a drum. Right now, part of our office suite has its heat / AC controlled by the folks in the next suite.
Which is annoying, but not NEARLY as bad as the summer I spent doing data entry, in a big old warehouse of a building (former roller rink, I believe) that had exactly one thermostat.
In the other tenant’s area.
Oh, did I mention, the other tenant was a hairstyling school? Where they use lots of heat-generating appliances and thus are likely to roast alive if the AC isn’t set down into Antarctic territory?
There were days where my fingers were so blue and stiff I could hardly type.
I recall one place I worked, the thermostat was locked, but it was reasonable… if the fans were on. Otherwise, only about half the area got heat or A/C, and, of course, the thermostat was on the side that wouldn’t get the conditioned air. The fans power was accessible to anyone, the speed controls were in select cubes (those beneath the fans).
Some people don’t like the feel of moving air, I guess. Others liked to set the fans to the point that loose papers would get blown around. It got to the point where people were stealing the knobs of the fan controls. I managed to talk someone into giving me the one they’d taken, and convinced the people who had controls I could see to leave them set to where I set them.
I still feel sorry for the people with offices, though. They were full height partitions against the outer walls. They were always too warm in summer and too cold in winter. But the windows opened, and space heaters were tolerated.
At home, well, it can still be an issue. We’ve got oil based steam heat, so we get a fair amount of fluctuation (it’s going keep getting warmer for awhile after the furnace shuts off, and it won’t kick on again until it’s at least 2 degrees under the set temp). My wife feels hot, or cold based on, well, what she feels. We came to an agreement that we will never set the house warmer than 72 or under 68, and it’s usually at 70. In the car she keeps turning the climate control up or down to make it change tempatures fasters. I’ve mostly conviced her that this does nothing (my car will get to 70 as fast if the climate control is set to 70 or 85). I’m sure that’s left over from the days of the sliders in cars that controlled the output temp, instead of the ambient temp.
My housemates are fighting over this right now. We’re poor college students in a poorly-insulated rental house, so the debate is between 60 and 65. I’m studiously (no pun intended) staying out of the argument- I’m comfortable being warm and broke or cold and less broke.
It is currently 67 degess F at my desk, as it is all year round. I work in a very large government building and the temp is adjusted so that the execs at the other end of the building are comfortable. Everybody else can just suck it up. 67 isn’t so bad in the winter, they at least have the excuse of saving energy, but it is also 67 in the height of the summer heat. Everyone in my area wears sweaters and coats year round.
67 may not seem like a very low temp but if you work at a desk you can find yourself pretty chilled by at the end of 8 hours. I have trouble typing some days.
At home, my wife and I keep it at whatever we want to stay toasty warm. The ability to control our environment is what seperates us from the animals and I want to make sure the animals know who’s the boss.
At my job over the summer, 4/5 of my coworkers were middle-aged women, and I know most (and possibly all) of the four were going through menopause. Therefore, the AC was on 65 and some had space heaters.
My boss’s office was somehow this room carved between the museum and library; it got both of their air conditioning in the summer. I think it was around 55 in there, and he wore a coat.
Me? I wore wool pants and sweaters to work. When I walked to my car or out to lunch, people looked at me like I was nuts.
But I spend 99% of the winter uncomfortable, except in my own apartment. I know I keep it warmer than most (72), so I always look for an apartment when heat is included.
I can say without reservation that it’s much more comfortable to be too warm then too cold. Asking people - directly or indirectly - to wear coats inside is unfathomable.
I’ve never worked anywhere in Western Canada where the temperature in the buildings was comfortable. It was always too hot in summer, and too cold in winter, or vicy versy, or something wonky. For all the money and technology that goes into HVAC for buildings, they still can’t get it right.
She will crank the temp to 90 because she is cold, then it hits 90 so she opens window to cool it off. That totally fucks your budget if you pay for fuel to heat with.
I think she was our roommate back in 1992 and 93 … Holy crap on a stick, I would come home from work to see the heater cranked to the max and the fucking windows open with the furnace blasting away.:smack:
He Who Controls The Temperature is either a masochist or a former member of the Polar Bear Club. Just kidding. The problem, I think, arises from formal dress conventions- men are layered up in suits, while women wear lighter clothing. All winter (and frequently in the summer) the women lose entire limbs to frostbite, while the men wonder what the fuss is about, even as they step around the caribou herds on the way to the bima.
At work, I have never adjusted the thermostat, but I know that it is usually set between 68-70. This is due to the fact that we work in an old farm house that was converted into offices and classrooms. Our downstairs (where my class is) is comfortable for jeans and t-shirt, sometimes a little warm. Upstairs, some use space heaters and some are just cold. At my old job, the heat would go off at random times, and the air would only cool down to 70 before pouring water through the back ceiling. We never had thermostat wars there, just lots of complaining about something we couldn’t fix.
At home, there are no thermo-wars. Sometimes it’s warm, sometimes it is cold. Usually, it is set around 68. Comfortable for us most of the time, but when the little one gets out of the bath, we usually crank it up a little and let him enjoy running around in the nude. Of course, if the boss changes it, it stays that way. She is the boss (and my wife), after all…
At work, I just suck it up and deal because there’s no other option. One centrally-located thermostat controls the temperature in all of the buildings, and I imagine that said thermostat is on the top of a mountain in Colorado, surrounded by armed guards.
At home, Mrs. Homie and I fight about it during the summer. She thinks we’re poor and that we’re going to not be able to afford the electric bill if I run the A/C at anything cooler than “so hot it will make a pig sweat.” I, OTOH, grew up in a house where it was freaking sweltering, and I swore when I left home that I was never going to live like that again. I keep it at about 58F in the summer (I’m not kidding).
My personal comfort level is around 25 degrees Celsius (77F). Irishfella’s is around 16C (61F).
We compromise at 20C (68F) and I wear a lot of knitwear, and can usually be found under a blanket on the sofa with a hot water bottle somewhere close by.
Summer holidays are fun for us- I finally get to wear short sleeves while irishfella scowls from the shade or stays indoors where the A/C prevents him from melting.
Driving is worse- we have a rule that the driver is in charge of the heating or A/C- that way we know whether I have to bring a coat, hat and gloves to wear in the car, or if he needs to wear a t-shirt for the drive and dress when we arrive…I’m not actually kidding.
We used to do something similar at college. The AC in the dorms was controlled by a thermostat in a lock box that we couldn’t adjust. But that’s ok. We just put the mini fridge on a tall table backed right up against it so the coils would keep it nice and warm, and us nice and cool.
A co-worker and I constantly fought over the A/C setting in the summer. The thermostat was in her office and she would be freezing. So she had a space heater in her office. Which means the temperature in her office would increase and make the A/C run more, which made it colder in the office, which means she would run her space heater more, etc. etc.
I tried to explain it to her. She was the sharpest knife in the drawer.
Don’t ever work in Japan. Doesn’t matter how hot it is in the office, the Japanese office ladies - most of them wearing paper-thin skirts and blouses - will complain all day about how cold they are - even when the A/C is at its lowest setting. There were numerous office wars when we found out that some of the girls were taping over the AC vents in the ceiling. It’s gotten mildly better in recent years, as companies are letting guys go tie-less during the summer. But I’ve still spent summers in Hong Kong that were cooler than some Tokyo office buildings I’ve worked in.
Hong Kong is the other extreme - they have the A/C on constantly. I like it cool - I’m from Minnesota, but would still spend the majority of the winter in t-shirts. But I got physically ill sitting in a movie theater, it was so cold (actually, the movie was Titanic, so I guess it could have been the movie, not the A/C, that made me ill, but anyway). The topper tho was when the buses and cabs would have the A/C blaring in the middle of January when it was barely above freezing. That was just crazy…
Both my roomie and me like it cold. However, I like it FRIGID. Even in the non-summer we here in FLA call winter. I usually win the thermo-war by being closest to the control for later in the night. I like to sleep on the couch sometimes which is near the thermostat. When he finishes his pre-sleep shower he sets the temp to 72 before going to his room. I then immediately get up, set it back to 67-68 and smugly go back to sleep.
I grew up in a house where the temperature was never above 60, summer and winter. When I go home, I take winter clothes even in summer (although I usually just go home for winter holidays).
Therefore, I’m most comfortable when the heat in winter is around 65 (although right now the heat in the house is 67 because it’s been zero degrees in Denver for three days and I’m really cold).
However, the SO (who, I remind him often, spend the first 17 years of his life in Maine, Connecticut, and Colorado before moving to California) claims he’s too cold below 72 due to his thin California blood. I tell him to put on a sweater, skinny vegetarian Maine boy that he is
We tend to not use the air conditioner in the summer unless the temperature in the house (shaded by trees) is above 85.
Boy, this is a replica of our household, except I’m the one who needs the cold temperature and my guy craves warmth. We keep the thermostat at 20C when he’s around. When I’m alone in the house like now (for the next few days), I keep it at 15C. It feels wonderful.
My son is like me, and his wife is like you. She wins the heat war, I hear, and he’s getting acclimated.
