They robbed the hot air

We'd installed some comms equipment in long relocatable cabin. It had kit at one end that got warm and a couple of workstations at the other. It was fitted with air con whose main aim was to keep the internal temp liveable for the operators across a wide range of external temperatures and, obviously, keep the equipment in it's comfort zone. The kit didn't get specially hot but the whole thing had to work across a broad external temp range so the HVAC was a bit more special than a couple wall-mounted units. When we got it on site for integrate and test the operators complained that the temperature oscillated from too hot to too cold. They were notoriously fussy people so we ignored them and got on with important stuff. Then the kit logs started showing temperature warnings and those, too, seemed to be regular. In fact, you could almost set your watch by the cycle so the initial suspiscion that the operators were fiddling with the temp setttings were quickly set aside. When we put temp monitors in we found the temp at each end of the cabin went from hot to cold over a very regular ~1.5 hour cycle and the temps at each end of the cabin were exactly out of phase. We spent a lot of time diagnosing and in the end the HVAC contractor stripped down the whole system and it turned out that they'd installed one section of ducting incorrectly that was enough to set up the oscillation.

However it always seems to be the vocal ones who whinge about it being "too cold" and insist on making everyone else uncomfortable by getting the HVAC temps turned up. I'm someone who naturally runs "warm". Over 20°c is bearable but only if I'm not doing any physical work, and it takes me very little to start struggling in warmer temperatures.

If it's too cold you can warm up by putting on extra layers. Wandering around shirtless or in underwear due to the heat would probably be considered unwelcome at most workplaces (unless your employer is paying you to do so, anyway).

Perhaps the winner I encountered was one of the periods I had purgatory employment in ISO Class 5 cleanrooms. In one the HVAC unit was on the ground floor of the building in a storeroom, and pulled in air from the room itself rather than outside. After two new starts complained endlessly at the boss about how the room was too cold, he nudged the temperature up to 22°C. Perfectly fine, but not if you're wearing thick tyvek suits, overshoes, hairnets and two pairs of gloves (cotton with vinyl gloves over the top). Unpleasant isn't the word - on a busy day some of us were coming out effectively drenched in sweat under the cleanroom gear.

Not long after this we noted the HVAC system struggling to maintain the correct humidity and temperature in the room, making intolerable conditions even worse.

We had a service engineer out, he gave the HVAC unit a once-over and found it was fine. The issue was eventually rooted down to the product packers who used the storeroom having a habit of stacking flatpacked cardboard boxes against the air inlet...

I firmly agree that it's better for the temperature setpoint to be on the low side, rather than the high side, allowing some to add layers, if required. However, there's another issue that crops up often - the location of the vents.

Most HVAC systems seem to maintain the temperature by pumping in air that is either very warm or very cool, depending of the required correction. Seldom is the incoming air just above or below the setpoint. That creates localised issues for those under the vents. In one place I was at - with a wall of south facing windows, the solution adopted was to block the vent above the biggest complainant. [All fudged with cardboard.] The remaining vents then had to work harder, and so became more uncomfortable. The solution was to block those too. Obviously, that only gets worse as the process repeats!

Perhaps unsurprisingly, this tended to start with those that only wore a t-shirt.

Worked in a clean room in UK and our temperature was set to 20°C bit our Taiwanese fab (and office, which is where I work these days when I'm there) work at 23°C to save considerable amounts of energy. Operators wear a thin cotton suit under the clean room garment. And office attire is a t-shirt etc. I find it more comfortable than my UK office which struggles to get above 15°C in winter

I agree totally.

You can always add more clothes if required.

The other way around, there comes a point where, even if you ignore basic social etiquette, there comes a point where you can't take any more off.

The only solution at that point is the wet T-shirt - again, not something that most workplaces will be tolerating.

Those who are lucky enough to be able to work remotely will enjoy.

While you can certainly "layer up," there are parts of your body that can't be effectively layered, such as hands and fingers.

I once had an office which was perpetually freezing and I'd have to wear a hoodie and sometimes a coat over it just to avoid shivering all day long.

Layers were fine for most of my body, but mittens were more or less out of the question, seeing as how I am an overpaid typist. . . er. . . trained software professional who needs to type a lot. My fingers and hands would get cold to the point of pain. 1

I tried multiple solutions, including pasting an electrical terrarium heater to the underside of the desk to create a warm spot 2 and wearing disposable gloves to keep some of the body heat in. 3

Dinking with the thermostat didn't really help 4 since there was a draft coming from somewhere that I could never identify.

It only was cured when I just upped and moved to a recently vacated office on the other side of the building and dared management to say "boo" about it.

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1 Perhaps due to incipient arthritis, being of the " older persuasion," as I am. . . and no wisecracks, kiddo, it'll happen to you. . . if you're lucky.

2 An idea quickly discarded due to the obvious fire hazard.

3 Wearing them all day long made my hands begin to itch. I'm not sure whether it was from the powder used to make the gloves easier to put on but whatevr it was, that experiment only lasted a couple of days.

4 I'm not sure the thermostat actually controlled anything or was user-adjustable. I'd heard rumors that they were there just to give the illusion of control and the temperatures were actually controlled from the central physical plant office but I was never able to confirm that local legend.

It was a regular office building with fully functional HVAC. Problem #1: as is often the case, the thermostat was set too low for my liking. I think I'm part cat -- I like things warm, dammit.

Problem #2: one of my co-workers found the temperature too high for his liking. And he had access to the machine room. So he tended to block the door open, so the cold machine-room air would grant him relief.

Problem #3: The machine-room door was just across from my desk, which meant that I -- who was already chilly -- got most of the "benefit" of his efforts, while he, on the far side of the office, got fairly little.

And as a lowly contractor, I wasn't in a position to ask to swap desks with him.

As for what his workaround meant for the servers' security (and temperature)? Well, I grumbled to myself, but as low man on the totem pole, it wasn't my place to raise a fuss...

Is the biggest cause of problems in offices, especially where the HVAC was designed around one layout and the internal partitions were rearranged afterwords.

At a previous employer it got to the point that you could walk out the building at the end of the week, and when you came back in you would find a wall in the middle of the route to your desk.

This had the problem of light switches that didn’t work the lights in the room, AC controls that did nothing (well not in the room where your were sitting etc.

The lighting I think they finally sorted with motion sensors, but the AC nope…..

I seem to have had more than my fair share of aircon related issues!

Not once, but twice had machine room underfloor space flooded when aircon pipes burst. 2 different companies too.

Then there was the time the aircon was first switched on after a move to a new building/machine room only for it to spit little bits of rust/debris all over the place - not good for the mainframe (ICL2966) and the disk packs we had to use. Turns out no-one thought to even test the aircon before starting up the mainframe post-move, until it got a little 'toasty'.

My favourite was the time, during hot periods, one of the machine rooms would get so hot systems would start powering themselves off. The only warning we'd get was when machines started going offline, which gave us about 10 minutes before everything else went. Bear in mind getting in the machine room was a security nightmare - and the 'fix' was to have all doors open to the outside and hire some very big fans to get air moving through the room.

Nearly forgot this gem. We used to have racks that had a foot bolted to the front to prevent it toppling over. One rack's foot partially blocked an air vent (poor planning), and someone unbolted it to move the vent. Unfortunately they forgot to bolt the foot back on again, and when an engineer came to fix a problem on a machine near the top of that rack, he pulled it out and the rack started to fall over. Luckily I was there and managed to stop it from falling on him. He hadn't pulled out the machine far enough to lock the rails, so we were able to push it back in quickly enough to prevent a more serious problem. We were both a bit shook up after that!

One place I worked at in Perth, Australia, had a fire exit which opened onto the car park. Every lunch time, everyone used this door to go to their cars and thence onto a lunch bar. Only problem was the air conditioning sensor was right next to this door. Every time the door was opened, a blast of hot, 42C air wafted over the sensor. As a result, the air conditioning was working overtime to cool down the building. After lunch, the office temperature plummeted from a pleasant 20C to an arctic 12C!

Another Perth aircon story. Over 30 years ago I was working in a building that had evaporative air condition - also known as "damp fug" - It worked fairly well when the weather was hot and dry, but seemed to make the air worse when warm and humid. I needed a reverse-cycle system to control the room temperature when we were installing a very expensive instrument that required stable temperatures. The MD was not impressed when he found out, and I had to explain that it was for the instrument, and not the staff. Purely by coincidence, the summer when it was installed and working found most of the staff sitting in that room.

In a Calgary meeting room directly underneath the A/C equipment it could reach a balmy minus thirty Celsius in Winter - a whole ten degrees warmer than outside. We went in there with parkas on.

Many years ago I did some contract Unix sysadmin at a large insurance company in South London. They ran a pair of Sequent machines.

The previous sysadmin had gone in to do some work at the weekend that had to be done in the machine room. He felt cold so switched the HVAC off, did what he had to do and went home.

By Monday the machines had cooked themselves. One of them never quite worked right after that, occasional strange problems.

I once did a stint at an insurance company during a hot western European summer. At the time, wearing business attire was mandatory, even for IT. So I wore the jacket on my arm, got into my "office" (the server room), put my jacket on, buttoned it, and toiled away. And the end of the day I would take my jacket off and go home... Fortunately it was just for a pair of weeks, but it felt really awkward.

I was wise enough not to mess with the aircon though, I'm sure the client wouldn't be pleased otherwise.

That reminds me of the times when I used to fairly frequently cross the pond from the right side to the wrong left ;-) side - specifically Houston. Travelling in summer, I didn't anticipate much need for warm clothing. That was true outdoors. However, indoors I found the HVAC so severe that I quickly learned to pack a jumper for inside the office.

With comms rooms I have worked in the jacket would be needed as it is so cold in there.

One job I went to the site in Sunderland discovered I had not bought a jumper with me and had to go to the nearest supermarket (only thing still open) to buy one so I could work without shivering.

In contrast my current employer has a site in a brand new DC complex and you can walk around that comfortably, it is kept at a reasonable temp (19C ish) and the aircon doesn’t attempt to blow you out of doors.

One day, outdoors having a cigarette with a Data Centre manager in SE Asia who'd just given us "the tour" and whom I knew from working together elsewhere, I asked about the hot and cold aisles:

"So, how much space is running warmer?"

"XYZ square metres".

"How much money does that save?"

"More than you'd think, x thousand dollars a month! TPTB are very impressed."

"What's the total size of the building?"

"XXXXYYYYYYZZZZZZ square metres."

"Right. Given how you've just had to get a lad with a screwdriver to tweak the thermostat to stop us all freezing our balls off in the meeting room, how much would, say, two degrees on the entire building save?"

He left at Warp 10 to do some maths and get more lads with screwdrivers on the case.

James Capel stock brokers used to have Tandems in the basement of their city office. When the IRA bombed Baltic Exchange they lost power to the office but the Tandems stayed up (internal and external UPS). The air-conditioning didn't, they ended up propping the basement doors open. The Tandems overheated but still stayed up.

Later, I was working at NatWest. We needed some extra Tandem CPUs and bought some second hand. The Tandem rep who installed them looked up the serial numbers and took great delight in telling us that they were the ones that had been run over temperature for days at James Capel. Still worked fine.

Also at NatWest, we had a small Tandem CLX in a basement. To prevent overheating the basement windows were left open. It started to report errors, the engineer found corrosion where the rain had blown in. We got a bollocking for that one.

When I was contracting at $BIGFIRM, they had a lot of legacy big iron. Other than the reception desk, it took up the entire ground floor office of the company's high rise. Although $VENDOR offered on-site support, and in fact had provided it for several years, if not decades, the new management had cancelled it two years earlier, because " we can maintain our own computers, just as well, for a lot cheaper ".

Narrator: They could not, in fact, maintain the computers just as well.

$VENDOR had addressed HVAC by providing what were essentially refrigerators at strategic locations in the ground floor's system room. And by providing, I mean renting, at a high cost, which the new management considered an unnecessary expense, and so they were cancelled. The IT crowd objected, saying that a melting computer center would be a bad idea, but management persisted.

Their idea was cheaper, and just as good. Even better, in fact. They would water cool the ground floor. They rerouted plumbing so that the system room would be water cooled. It seemed to work in general, but the room temperature was uneven, fluctuating based on water consumption, being noticabely warmer on weekends and holidays.

One day, I was charged with installing a new network cable. I entered the system room, along with a new hire I was training, and when we entered the room, it was stifling. It should be between 18C-22C, but it was just under 29C. I said we'd better report this to Facilities, and he casually mentioned that they already knew. In fact they'd told him that there was a "known temperature issue in the machine room" 20 minutes earlier, he'd forgotten to mention it.

I grumbled, but one must always be polite to wives, politicians, and new hires, so I just continued on.

I was to show him how to hook up a cable a cable, and I explained the raised floor setup we had. I got the suction cup grip, and lifted the tile on the raised floor, preparing to show him the 18" elevation below, with the "eel farm" (as it was called) of network, electrical, and god knows what other cables that were underneath the floor.

I was not prepared to show him the 12" of running water that a broken cooling pipe had flooded. The new hire, unaware that this was not normal, asked me if it was a good idea to have stick my hand in running water that had power cables like that. No, I agreed, that it would in fact be a bad idea, a very bad idea.

He asked me what we should do, then. Sadly, this predated the Pinky and the Brain cartoons' (in)famous " We shall flee in terror. Yes. That would be the wisest choice " quote, because it would have been tremendously appropriate.

I restored the floor covering, we left the room at speed, and casually mentioned to Facilities that there was a foot of running water in the system room. The Facilities person was fairly senior, and responded appropriately. There was an announcement on the PA system about five minutes later informing everyone in the building that they were shutting off all computer systems down, immediately , so save your work. People calling Facilities to ask them to delay were greeted with ringing phones, as the entire Facilities department was in the system room, powering everything off as quickly and safely as possible.

My network cable installation task was deferred for two months. When I did it, the system room was 18C again, I noticed those portable refrigerator units were back, and there was not only a lack of running water under the floor, I saw some moisture sensors there that had running wires, presumably to a system that would alert Facilities if there had been another broken pipe.

I joined a small company that had been acquired by a bigger one. We were on the 6th floor of an office building, and had our server room on our floor. Just before Christmas I was one of only a couple of people in the office, and we heard the server alarms going off. Turned out the AC unit had died and temps were rising. Nobody in the office that day had access to the server room, but we were able to contact someone at corporate and convinced them to unlock it remotely.

We were able to open up some of the drop ceiling tiles to let the hot air out, and ran some fans to pull in cool air from the office (through the propped-open door). The AC was fixed the next day, and no servers died - which was good, because we didn't have access to those either.

As for most things life-related, [1]College Humor had that one nailed as well.

[1] https://youtu.be/d2NNm8MTboA