I had a tour of some of the engineering spaces at my office building today, and was surprised to find that the building has no conventional source of heating. With a few thousand humans and their computers, the air conditioning runs year-round, even in winter, to keep the place under 74 degrees.
It seems one of the big obstacles for large buildings to adopt more energy efficient lighting like LEDs is that they will somehow need to make up for that missing heat. The building engineer said that the changeover from CRT monitors to LCDs a couple of years ago put them close to needing to install electric heaters in the HVAC system. If they make the lighting any more efficient, they will end up worse overall as electric heat is expensive to run.
Just something to think about the next time you look at some perceived inefficiency at your office. A seemingly innocent change to the lighting could knock the whole place out of whack.
Speaking of knocking things out, I also found out how big a 750KVA 3-phase, 480 volt UPS is - with batteries, these beasts are nearly as large as a school bus.
As a side note, if you’ve ever seen large-scale mechanical spaces and marveled at how they’re kept immaculate with meticulously painted piping and gleaming floors, it’s both from a sense of professional pride and the very practical idea that any leaks will be obvious.
I’m fairly certain my office doesn’t have heat. It’s Minnesota and we’re always fucking freezing in here. I’m shivering as I type this, matter of fact.
I believe the Mall of America is unheated.
Yep. While the individual stores have heating the mall areas and the theme park in the center are unheated.
They will not end up worse overall. Inefficient lighting is electric heat. If you replace it with efficient lighting, you are just removing electric heating capacity, meaning you have to add it somewhere else. It wouldn’t be worse, it would just be the same. 1 kilowatt-hour of waste heat from incandescent lighting costs just as much as 1 kilowatt-hour of heat from a resistive heating grid.
If you can eliminate enough waste heat, you may be able to justify investing in more cost-effective methods of heating the building, e.g. natural gas or fuel oil.
I once worked in a large, multi-storied building when PCs were first hitting the office desktops. It was very hot year round. The AC couldn’t keep up with the added heat from computers and the old cathode ray tube monitors. It didn’t get any better in the winter as the AC system depended on flowing water to cool the system down. No water was flowing when it was below freezing outside! Of course the windows could not be opened.
The Montreal Metro system has no heating (and also no air conditioning). The system is closed and the friction from the rubber tires generates enough heat to keep things toasty all winter–and unpleasant all summer.