Classroom/Bushcraft engineering. We should have a badge for this! (Mostly joking)

This year my school has had numerous issues with temperature control in the school.  Sometimes the A/C goes off on hot days (and the rooms become almost uninhabitable) and at others the A/C gets a little too ambitious.  Actually, due to a weird air purity law that was passed *during* construction, both the A/C and heat run side-by-side every single day!  Talk about non-Permies!  But such is Illinois law.

At any rate, frequently the computer that runs the whole HVAC system is buggy and makes some areas hot while others are cold.  I have no problem with cold but I can’t stand the hot and humid classroom.  Today we got an email telling that the admin is thankful for our collective patience, but I am out of patience and decided to take matters into my own hands.

I have a thermostat on the wall, but have no control over it—or so my admin thinks.  I decided to use my coffee machine to heat up some scalding hot water and then poured that water into a little plastic bottle—one of numerous littering the school.  I then duck-taped it to the wall and then tapped some paper towels on top as insulation.  Over that I taped a paper heat shield I made from a collection of papers I had laying around.  

The basic idea is to convince the thermostat that the temperature is much warmer than the air temperature actually is!


Make do with what you have to do what you can!

I could feel the temperature drop even before finishing the taping of the water bottle.


Eric

It sounds like your school has a heat pump system with a faulty thermostat or wiring since the a/c and heat run at the same time.

As far as I know besides your fix there is not much that can be done since that is not your department.

Dear hubby recent hospital stay came with the same experience.  The wall thermostat lever did not seem to change anything.  Hubby said he was hot and I was freezing.

Hi Anne!

I don't think it is a true heat pump.  I know that we have these huge chillers on one side of the building.  I guess they hold cold water to use for cooling air for the cool side of the system.  I also know that we have an actual gas furnace that provides at least some of the heat.  Truth be told, it is possible that the chilling unit might use the excess heat to do at least some of the heating, but the system does need a gas component--literally every single day of the year.  In the warmest day of the year the gas furnace is working and on the coldest day the chillers are at work.  Above mine and every other classroom there are two sets of ducts--one that is hot and one that is cold.  The actual temperature depends on how much those two ducts are merged together as they exit into my classroom.


I learned this from one of the former maintenance personnel.  He was telling me that the whole building is a huge energy draw, giving the district gigantic energy bills, far exceeding what was expected.  Moreover, this was made worse because the need to always have heat and A/C running no matter the outside temperature had to do with an indoor clean air act that was made law after the building architecture, blueprints had been finalize and substantial portions of the building had been completed.  The district then had to rework in new ducts and an HVAC system that was far larger that originally anticipated do to simultaneous heating and cooling.  The indoor air quality is very good when the system is running, but recently that has been a rare event and in any event, that air is expensive, no matter what the temperature.

A little bit of silver lining is that the school is installing a substantial amount of solar panels on the roof and should withing a few weeks be producing a significant portion of the school's electricity.  I don't yet know how that will affect the overall energy bills.  We will see.

Any way, I was just making a long-winded and expanded explanation of the weird HVAC system that we have and why I can manipulate it so easily!



Eric

In college, we did something similar with ice cubes to "fool" the thermostats in our drafty, freezing apartments  (where our slumlords had lockboxes over the thermostats, cheapskates). When the cup of water on your desk froze solid at night, you knew things were getting out of control and you needed to take action....

I slightly modified my design.  

The hot water bottle kept the thermostat warm and thus the room nice and cool all day.  Of course, it is cooled off by the next day and needs new hot water.  I place a ladder and a couple of old books in strategic positions, taped the insulation in a loop around the bottle without actually tapping the bottle, and now I can simply pull the old, cooled off bottle out, pour the water out to water some plants and then refill from my coffee maker.


I love it!  Girls who don’t wear enough clothes to school hate it.  I love it more!



Eric