The case of the cold offices This fridays case

RayWohlfarth

In this case, there was a wide temperature difference between the offices. It was a simple heating system with copper fin tube baseboard heat. There was a non programmable thermostat in one office that controlled the zone valve. The room with the thermostat was 8 degrees warmer than the others. My first thought was there was a portable heater in the room but we didnt find one. Signs were posted that prohibited heaters. I'll let you know Friday morning what I found,

ratio

Flow restriction of some type, maybe the valve wasn't opening fully or something lodged in the throat?

dko

They had file cabinets in front of the baseboards in all the other rooms

Intplm.

The other offices had furniture or file cabinets in the way of the heating elements.

DCContrarian

The room with the thermostat had a photocopier and some servers.

retiredguy

You probably found 1 or more of these possibilities: Office machines or some other heat source adding to the heat in the warmest room; dirty elements or restricted air flow through the heaters in the colder rooms; the warmest room had more people than the colder rooms. One last possibility, they did a space upgrade where they took a large space and added walls to have more separate rooms or offices with no regard for how much radiation was left in each space.

mattmia2

Someone didn't do their integral calculus when they designed it.

mattmia2

or the circulator's bad and gravity is only providing enough flow to heat the first section of emitter.

RayWohlfarth

Thanks for all the great responses. It turns out the women in that office, the boss's mother, would bring a portable heater with her every morning and take it home every evening even though heaters were banned. The only way I found it was by going into her office during a lunch break and hearing it buzzing under her desk. Thanks sirs! Case of the cold offices

Intplm.

Wow. Lucky catch.

It reminds me of some office and lab rooms that were designed with CRT computers in the rooms. They were considered in the heat loss calculation design as heat emitters for some unknown reason. Ridiculous! When the picture tube computers were replaced with flat screens everything went haywire. Complaints, complaints, and more complaints.

RayWohlfarth

@Intplm. I would imagine. I never worked in one of those. Thanks for watching and the comments

ray

ratio

https://forum.heatinghelp.com/discussion/comment/1806827#Comment_1806827

They were considered heat emitters because they are heat emittets. You can tell, because once that heat source went away the system lost control. If they hadn't been accounted for, the system wouldn't have been able to control the space (until they left).

Remember, 100% of electricity used ends up as heat in a space.

Intplm.

https://forum.heatinghelp.com/discussion/comment/1806879#Comment_1806879

Sure thing. But I had never heard of such a thing until this happened. I have never taken a CRT tube type and used it toward a heat loss calculation. Residentially or commercially. And have never had complaints when removed. That situation threw me for a loop.

PC7060

back in the days of CAD we had rooms of engineers with 24” CRT monitors. The desks were specially designed by the resident engineer lead to position the monitors at an angle to corner to accommodate the longs yokes.

The CRT radiators were nice in the winter but not so much in summer.