You see! AI does led to job losses.

Then they'll crank the setpoint up to the temperature of the Sun, thinking that the room will heat up quicker.

That whole paragraph seems to be the tale of parent's / sibling's use of a radiator. The concept of "regulation" seems to escape them.

My mum to a tee. She would always crank up the thermostat to the heart of Kilauea when she felt a bit cold, then complain that the room became uncomfortably hot, and set the thermostat to arctic conditions. I cannot count the times I told her the meaning of the word thermo stat , but to no avail.

I still have to tell my wife to leave it alone !

I think you forgot "significant others" from that list.

Some struggle with the concept of a heater that should turn itself off when the room is at the right temp. Even on an heater that has two things to set, a thermostat, AND a effect switches.

What do you mean by "the room"?

It's more than the air temperature. It's the walls and everything in them. You need to get those warmed up before the room stops feeling cold.

Unless you have built-in heating in those you're using the air to transfer heat from the heat source - hot-water radiator, electric element or whatever - to all those things. Air isn't that great a heat transfer medium so it's going to be very ineffective if you just try to use air at your target temperature. Unless you set the timer to turn on well before you want the room to be warm an initial boost will be more effective.

Still unpersuaded? Remember that water is a far more effective heat transfer medium than air. What temperature is you water circulation set to? It's not room temperature, is it? It's more like 70C.

Your significant others are working by observation, not theory.

If theory and observation disagree you need to revise the theory.

And, as I mentioned in a recent " [1]Who, Me? comment thread, there's biology to consider, as well.

Males and females have different sensitivities to heat and cold and those sensitivities change with age.

As I observed there, men like it colder when they're younger and that preference gradually changes to prefer warmth as they age, while women, who generally have less body mass, especially when younger, prefer a warmer environment and that seems to also change with age.

My partner often comes into my office 1 in the house and wonders why it's sweltering when to me it's "just right."

Per Douglas Adams, " Life, said Marvin dolefully, loathe it or ignore it, you can't like it. " Same goes for biology.

________________

1 Which has the world's most inefficient space heater, a 64 core Ryzen machine along with several terabytes of NAS, etc ., sitting beside me.

[1] https://forums.theregister.com/forum/all/2026/04/06/who_me/

In the days when railway carriages had compartments, there would often be a switch marked "Heating: High/Low". However it was rarely wired to anything, it just made the passengers think that they had some control.

A discussion me and Mrs have every time in winter when she turns the car aircon to +26ºC...

Depending on the nature of the feedback control loop, combined with the operational mode, used by the HVAC system, programming a setpoint some distance the "other side" of the desired temperature relatie to the current temperature *can* result in the room reaching that temperature faster than it would if the setpoint were set to that temperature.

From the control loop perspective, these will typically be designed to avoid overshoot, so as you get closer to the setpoint, the more the system will back off the level of heating/cooling effort applied to achieving the target temp. If the setpoint is placed t'other side of the desired temp, you're giving the control loop carte blanche to continue running at full chat up to and probably a little beyond that temp, before it starts to back off to avoid overshooting the temp it's been told to reach, as opposed to the temp you actually want it to reach...

From the operational mode perspective, if the system is designed to save energy, then it may not even attempt to hit the setpoint temp, and might be satisfied to simply settle on a temp within a few degrees of it - IIRC from back in the days when I used to design such systems, we had a default tolerance of +/- 2 deg.C for our eco mode setup - such that the time taken to reach the desired temperature may become infinite unless you similarly force the issue by programming a setpoint further above/below the desired temp such that *your* desired temp is one the system would have to reach/pass through on the way towards the range of temps *it* thought would fulfil your desires based on the setpoint value.

So whilst it's correct to say that changing the setpoint can't improve the fundamental capability of the system to change the temperature if it's running at full chat, it's not correct to ridicule the idea that doing so would result in the system being able to reach the desired temperature faster than if you just leave it at the desired temperature and let the system do its own thing. Some systems *can* be positively influenced by doing so, others might not be, so if someone has had first-hand experience of seeing beneficial effects of tweaking the setpoint, it'd take a brave person to suggest they're wrong unless they have intimate knowledge as to the characteristics of that particular system configured in that particular environment...

It does make sense in an intuitive, if not physical, way.

To get a pot of water to boil faster on the stove, what do you do? Crank up the dial to "high," of course.

Without a full understanding of how A/Cs work this is a perfectly reasonable, if incorrect, analogy.

Lucky you if it's only parents and siblings. This is true for the vast majority of people that I know.

Mrs Coward does this. I then suggest that turning up the temperature to higher than you want it like setting the satnav to Manchester when you want to go to Birmingham in the hope of getting there faster.(We approach Birmingham from the South). She just looks at me funny and moves on with her day.

Clearly an invention by the devil himself as a way to promote continuous office wars.

At one job I proposed disconnecting the thermostat (and adding a new hidden one) without telling anyone.

If they felt better playing with the unused control no harm is done.

Indeed, never underestimate the benefits of the placebo effect...

I remember one job, back in the good old days (when Y2k was the biggest problem...) when the lab AC was the biggest problem at work. Where my team sat, in the middle of a testing lab full of equipment, it was always hot, which we complained about. When it was eventually fixed for us, the people sitting at the ends of the lab were coming in and working with fleeces and gloves because it was never meat-locker temps for them.

It turned out that there was an epic combination of poorly sited sensors and a seized row of duct fans that were causing the issue.

Great place, lovely environment. A shame the place was nearly levelled when Buncefield went up a few years later.

..to install a dummy thermostat in each room so the (l)users think they have control. They'll be happy because they've twiddled, and the system can carry on being set to 18 in winter, 23 in summer.

I worked at a place that had a permanent temporary building, after one extremely warm summer, each room had an airco unit installed, you could turn the airco on or off, but not fiddle with the thermostat, that was behind a small faraday cage. Glad it wasn't IT's job to manage that, if an adjustment needed to be made, you had to call the facilities guys, Central Services at your service! Tuttle was here!

Upvote for the Brazil reference. Have one of these ------------------------------------------>

I work in a place that is a permanent temporary building which is Modular so each floor is three separate modules with the only chance for air to mix between them is when someone opens the fire door to the stairwell.

The HVAC is set to maintain a pre set (but changeable) *average* temperature across the three floors. Not the same temp on each of the floors, just to maintain the average.

It works as well as you can expect.

The building was designed by and for a now defunct .gov.uk Department who never used it because they realised they needed a bigger boat.

One would think they would stop using glass for elevators at this point.

My offices were always 'orribly cold, so my solution was a small heater under my desk and a light jacket kept in my locker. Today I work from home, and my solution is a thermostat that never changes by more than 3F year round.

As a matter of fact, the Ankh Morpork Postmasters office was terribly run down when you got there. One might even say that it was an abandoned ruin. The fact that you did not renovate the climate control system before you left for your next money-making job is actually your own fault.

If someone did change the thermostat I could imagine him Going Postal on them!

At my old office, we were "upgraded" to a "modern" system that left every floor cold.

Except one, which was toasty.

After much investigation /arm twisting I ascertained the early starter, as a first job of the day, put a bag of ice cubes from the freezer onto the thermostat. Job sorted!

In the dim and distant past I worked in an office with separate heating and air con. If it was hot, the aircon was on at full blast because the heating was cranked up. If it was cold, the heating was on full heat because the air con was on. It took a long time before someone realised that setting the relevant temperatures above and below the desired range would work, it still required armed guards to stop some muppet from changing the set temperatures.

Install an App on every PC or phone to allow each user to update a central database that works out the ideal temperature for most staff.