THERMOSTAT Who controls the temperature in your office?

'It's too hot' and 'It's too cold' are top office complaints.
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
Brooke Testerman, an administrative assistant at ATI Career Center in Hurst, Texas, normally freezes at work. Especially in the summertime, when her suit-wearing boss keeps the thermostat turned way down.
"I wear dresses and not as many layers as him," Testerman explains, "and it freezes me out."
It's so bad, she confesses, "I leave a coat at work."
Ah, the office thermostat: the bane of many an employee's workday, the cause of many a building engineer's premature gray hair.
Workers complain about fingers too frozen to type or the utter necessity of a personal desk fan. Building supervisors complain about serial complainers and overloaded electrical circuits thanks to the ubiquitous clandestine space heater.
Will cold and hot ever find a comfortable middle ground?
The top two
It doesn't look good. A 2003 survey by the International Facility Management Association found that, of the top 10 office complaints, "It's too cold" and "It's too hot" ranked Nos. 1 and 2, respectively, the same as in 1997 -- but a major reversal from 1991, when "It's too hot" beat out "It's too cold" by a degree or two.
When it comes to office buildings, say the HVAC experts, air temperature isn't just a technical issue -- it's a personality issue, a clothing issue -- and also a delicate psychological dance performed by the canny folks who control the thermostats.
"It turns out," says Dan Int-Hout, chief engineer for Krueger, an air-conditioning equipment manufacturer in Richardson, Texas, "that if you think you have control over your environment, it may be more important than actually having control over your environment."
Int-Hout is hinting at a sneaky little device called a placebo-stat, which does nothing but sit on a wall and look good. "It's a trick of the trade," he confesses.
But we'll get to that later.
First, uncomfortable employees need to seek the obvious remedy:
"Clothing is the biggest variable," says Int-Hout, who believes casual Friday is one of the best things that ever happened to the office thermostat.
"The guys are opening up their collars," and the women are wearing slacks, he says. This is leveling the playing -- er -- temperature field a bit. Or, in HVAC-speak, it's bringing men's and women's "clo" closer together.
What's a clo?
A clo, according to Int-Hout, is a measurement of clothing. A long-sleeve shirt buttoned at the collar plus a pair of pants and socks equals one clo. A skirt plus a blouse equals half a clo. And the difference between the two "moves your thermal preference four degrees, maybe five," Int-Hout says.
Thus, someone wearing one clo is comfortable at 72 degrees, and another person wearing only half a clo is happy at 76 degrees. (And, undoubtedly, the thermostat is set at 74.)
Keeping the peace is, of course, the unenviable responsibility of building engineers everywhere. And to do that, they sometimes have to play, well, dirty.
The placebo-stat, or dummy thermostat, has the effect of making building occupants feel as though they are in control of their temperature destiny, when, in fact, they have no control whatsoever.
"It's a standard tactic," says Int-Hout. "You have the problem complainer. One of the solutions is to let them think they're in charge."
Some placebo-stats, he admits, even make that convincing hissing sound when the unsuspecting temperature changer moves the tiny lever.
There are building engineers who readily acknowledge having used such gadgets in the past.
"I have actually installed dummy thermostats at other sites for the psychological benefit of [employees] controlling the zone next to their work area," says Gary McBee, now senior chief engineer for Huff Brous McDowell Management at the AmeriCredit Operations Center in Arlington, Texas.
Fans and heaters
Building engineers curse space heaters and portable fans, and not just for safety reasons. "When the circuit breaker trips, the first thing we look for is a space heater," says J. Leo Kinney, the engineer facilities manager at the Cash America building in Fort Worth.
That building's high-tech electronic temperature system doesn't even bother with thermostats. And Kinney allays temperature concerns by pointing an "infrared temperature gun" at the "temperature center" in conflict to prove to employees that, no, it's not 80 degrees where they're sitting.
None of this is an excuse for a poorly designed heating and cooling system in a building, Int-Hout says. But climatic harmony will come only when employees start dressing for the weather in their offices and building managers show they care.
"Putting a locked thermostat on the wall tells the employees you don't trust them," Int-Hout says, "which is probably true, but you shouldn't send them that message."