Feeling the heat in your room? Opening a window to let in some air? Contrary to popular belief, cracking that window or turning on that fan may be making things worse for others around you.
In almost all of the rooms and buildings around campus, certain systems are in place to monitor and control temperature levels. A number of things prevent this distribution of heat, making some rooms and buildings hotter and colder than others, and it is often the students or faculty that cause these issues, according to UNH’s Energy Office.
“Everybody on campus is part of this one linked system,” said Campus Energy Manager Matt O’Keefe. “What they do very much so impacts their neighbors and every other person.”
In almost all of the buildings around campus, heat is shared and distributed through a building and controlled at the room level through thermostats that, when used properly, allow for a building’s systems to work as they are expected to. Situations that circumvent heat levels without the use of the thermostat, however, skew the system’s capacity to function.
Heat is provided to rooms through a system that begins at one point and ends at another, according to O’Keefe. If there is a disruption in that system, some people further down the line could receive too much heat or not enough, depending on the situation.
“Fans can cause problems,” O’Keefe said. “Air gets blown around, maybe at a thermostat, and then the temperature gets misreported. All these folks coming up with their own remedies instead of calling the facilities support center can sometimes make things worse.”
In this example, if a room is reported to be colder than it really is, it will receive more heat than it should, and other rooms that may need more heat further down the line might not get it.
According to Jim Dombrosk, director of Energy and Utilities, the inverse situation – a room being reported as too hot – can be a significant problem as well.
“If people don’t get enough heat, they may bring in an electric heater, which causes a bigger problem because [heaters] use a lot of energy- not to mention they are not nearly as safe,” said Dombrosk.
To help alleviate this issue, officials recently met with hall directors and resident assistants around campus.
“Guides on the heating system are given out as you move in, but they come with about 40 other things as you come in, plus you end up not using that information for another three or four months,” said O’Keefe. “We are asking [students] to step in and take a role to assess the situation in the buildings. A good percentage of situations with people who are too hot or cold usually depends on something else in the room causing that problem.”
In most cases, according to the Energy Office, a problem with temperature in a specific room can be identified by a vent or furnace being prevented from heating or cooling a room in some way, something that hall directors and resident assistants could identify and correct without getting the Facilities Support Center involved. If these individuals are not able to solve a temperature problem, they are urged to contact the center to have the problem investigated and fixed.
“If we do not know about a problem along the way and people are regulating that problem by opening a window, it makes the problem worse,” said O’Keefe.
The process works in the same fashion for academic buildings around campus, though often times rooms are far hotter than they are intended to be. In a way, according to Dombrosk, this is a result not of too much heat, but not enough cooling – even in the winter.
“You will have people asking why Dimond Library is heated so well in the winter,” said Dombrosk. “We’re not heating it- we are just not running the air conditioner as much.”
A majority of the academic buildings utilize a Variable Air Volume system, a technological process that uses heated and cooled air to even temperatures out from one room to another based on the use of that room, how many occupants are in it, and other factors.
The process works through automatic sensors in every room that relay the temperature of that room to a centralized facility that regulates the distribution of air. In cases of rooms that are too hot, cold air is filtered into that room. In cases of rooms that are too cold, that same air will be heated within the system and brought into those rooms to raise the temperature. Really, what heat a room gets will be determined by its temperature along with the needs of surrounding rooms, given that the same air goes to all places.
Given the complexity of the system and how the shared air is distributed, the alternative manipulation of air temperature can, and will, cause heating issues in surrounding areas when cool air that needs to go to one place is sent to another room that is misreporting its temperature.
“There are a lot of different characteristics in different buildings,” said Dombrosk. “If [occupants] do not understand how [this process] works, then they can make miscalculations about how the system works.”
If you are experiencing problems with room temperature, contact the Facilities Support Center at 862-1437.
Campus buildings getting heat for uneven temps
Published: Thursday, November 5, 2009
Updated: Thursday, November 5, 2009
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