Heating and Cooling

This exam covers a point in the process where you have to start thinking about, what is our systems? How are our systems going to work? What kind of heating and cooling system is it? How are the lighting systems going to work? Are we going to have sprinkler systems, or are we not going to have sprinkler systems? All of those kinds of issues, and so we're thinking about those from a sort of code-related standpoint. We're thinking about, how do these issues fit to this kind of goal making that we were thinking about in the previous exam, when we're talking about programming and kind of early pre-design type issues, we're kind of coming up with what our game plan is.

Well now we're at that spot where we have to play out that game plan. Down the road, we'll be thinking about well, how big is the duct work, how big are the pipes, you know, how often do we have sprinkler heads. We'll get into the design, the details, the specifics down the road. But right now we're just trying to nail down well what are the systems?

And, so as I said, it's partly to do with our goals, it's partly to do with the code issues, it's partly to do with the kind of nature of how people generally work in this market. It's a whole series of different issues that would impact that decision making, but one of the key things that it's really about is the idea of comfort. The sense that we need to make situations for people, not just that answer the issues, not just that make it so that they can work, or can live, but they have a sense of comfort and that they feel as if they have been taken care of.

The buildings need to take care of the people. And that we have a very specific sense of what comfort means as humans, so generally when we're talking about systems and we're talking about comfort, we're talking about the idea of temperature combined with humidity, so it's the combination of the two. Now you've heard it many times when people will say, "well yeah it was hot, but it was a dry heat "so it wasn't so bad." Or you might have spent time in a place where it was very very hot and then you realize, well it's only about 85, but it's just that the humidity is really high.

So that sense that I can have it be 98 or something like that, but to be very dry and sort of reasonable, and feel okay, but then I can have it be 88 and very high humidity, so it's a lot cooler, but it feels much much hotter, right. That that combination is really what's at play, especially during the summer.

When we get into sort of cold weather questions, then there's gonna be a whole series of cultural expectations, seasonal expectations, a bunch of different things. You know, a 50 degree day when I was growing up, originally in California, was considered crazy cold. People couldn't believe it. And then, when I was a kid and we moved to the East Coast, you know 50 degree day in the winter was like a, everyone's wearing shorts, and running around playing games.

So, it's that sort of cultural expectation has a big impact on how people perceive what's reasonable. But inside our buildings, we have a very particular sense of what the temperature and the humidity really ought to be, so in the winter we can probably live with it being down to 66 degrees, 68 is considered kind of the optimal. 70, a lot of people would prefer it to be, as soon as you start getting up to 72, 74, 78, something like that, that's really warm for a wintertime, and you wouldn't really want to have your system set for something like that.

But if you let it get down to 64, 62, or 60, that's gonna start feeling very very cold over a span of time. So, that kind of prime spot is really gonna be in that 66 to 70 degree range for that winter inside a space, during the day.

At night, when we're sleeping and we're covered in our blankets and everything, we might allow it to go down a bit, in order to save some energy. It makes for nice sleeping weather inside our units, but for the bulk of the day, what we're gonna be looking for is that sort of comfortable zone of 66 to 70. In the summertime inside our buildings, we're looking for anything that's gonna keep us from sweating too much, anything that's gonna keep us from feeling uncomfortable, and too humid.

So we're looking for a temperature that's probably in the range, something over 72, probably around 75, maybe up to close to 80. As soon as you start getting over 80, in a building, you're probably starting to get out of people's normal comfort zones. But again, this depends on seasonal and cultural sort of expectations. If you're in certain parts of the country, it automatically gets over 80 all the time because you get used to it and it's just not a big deal, but maybe then 85 would be the number for that place.

So there's a range of comfort that people are okay in, it has to do both with that temperature and with the humidity level in the space. Clearly the different climates, lots of different climate types around the country, and some places are gonna be really focused on cold, and so the issues that are happening in the summer are secondary.

What you're really aiming at, is you have a heating system and it's all about keeping people warm in the winter. Other places gonna be exact opposite, it just never really gets cold enough to even really bother with the heating system, and you're gonna have all your efforts are really gonna focus on keeping the building air-conditioned or cool, at least in some way in that summertime. So the climate's gonna really dramatically impact what kinds of choices we're making, and in most of the country we'll fall somewhere in the middle, in that kind of temperate thinking, where there'll be need for something in the winter to keep everybody warm, and something in the summer to keep a little bit of cooling going and kind of depending on where you are, in the country, how much of...

Which one becomes the designed driver would depend on which is more important, the cooling or the heating. These are gonna be the issues that are gonna be the backbone of deciding what kinds of systems we're gonna choose.

It's gonna be partly, what does the code tell us, it's gonna be partly, what do our cost controls tell us, it's gonna be partly, what do people expect and what does the client expect, but it's gonna be mostly about, how do we create a place that is workable, and effective, and comfortable for the people who are gonna live and work in it. And that's what we're gonna be looking at.

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