Engineer Talk - Problems with controlling heating in community spaces

• Community buildings can save a lot of energy by getting the heating controls right.

• Think of thermostats –– if anyone turns it up, it stays up until the next time someone touches it.

• The knobs on radiators aren’t labelled with degrees, but they behave exactly the same way.

• These heating controls are fine if the people involved all know each other and can work out a way to behave they can all live with, but in our spaces, people might not even know who else uses the building.

• And there’s another problem – almost everyone thinks that if you turn the thermostat or radiator all the way up, it will get warmer faster. That isn’t true. It will just overheat eventually, since the top temperature is usually 26C.

• Newer electric heaters have thermostat knobs just like radiators, although there might also be a rocker switch that does control how fast the space will warm up. They also have another problem -it’s usually very easy to leave them on accidentally.

• Sadly, it’s hard to buy controls that do everything right in community buildings.

• The next activity will help think about whether users are comfortable and what they do if they are not, but it will also help us think about how we’re using the different spaces in the building.