Friday, August 05, 2016

Up Early

     For once, I'm up early.  Hoping to make that a theme this weekend and to get some things done before the temperature and humidity outdoors become unbearable.  I have spending my work days in a very large room cooled to at least 65* and it has made conditions outside feel all the worse.
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* There is a very long story there, with a moral about letting the desire to keep people happy trump what you know to be true.  You see, the equipment in this room and another one just like it has changed over time, becoming  smaller with each generation -- smaller, lighter and producing a lot less heat.  Meanwhile, the cooling was designed in the 1970s, way too much for the room,  Cooling is how you control humidity, too, and it takes pretty long run times to do so when the outside humidity gets high. An oversized system does not run for long to cool the room.  Fail!  Both rooms open onto a loading dock, big doors, and while it is supposed to be worked like an airlock, that's way too much effort for many of my co-workers.  Even more Fail! Then several of them had the bright idea to get both rooms turned up to 75: more comfortable and better for the environment, win-win!  They sold Building Maintenance on their clever idea and madcap highjinks ensued: the previous setting of 68 was just barely over the break-even point.  With the temperature up, the cooling units couldn't run enough to dry the air.  Add a couple of extended periods of time with loading dock and room doors open....  Not pretty.  Major Fail.  At one point there were damps patches on the walls.  The temperature has been turned back down to 68 but too late; the other room has the most activity and they're running dehumidifiers in it now.  I asked to have the temperature set as low as practical in the room where I'm working, doing some prep work for yet another generation of small, light, not-very-heat-producing equipment.  At least it will start dry; what the operators do after that is not in my control.

9 comments:

Fuzzy Curmudgeon said...

I had a professor once who said if the footnotes weren't longer than the text, the book wasn't any good. ;-)

But yeah, any good HVAC tech could have given them a good response to "What could go wrong?"

Roberta X said...

And yet -- they're still fiddling around with variable-frequency drives, having already tried slowing the air-handler way down. Wong answer! And this with "expert" advice. Jeepers: Remove 20-ton coil, install 5-ton. Hell, don't even remove it. Abandon it in place and bolt in the smaller one. Run the blower all the time.

mostly cajun said...

My 'air conditioning' story:

http://mostlycajun.com/wordpress/?p=654

My current projects in progress include a pair of 4160-volt, 6000 horsepower variable frequency drives. These are air-cooled, but we (that corporate 'we') elected NOT to use outside air for this, so the switchgear room with the drives in it has THREE air handlers, each with thirty tons of refrigeration capacity to handle the heat off those drives.

Working in a similar station already on line, that room is like a nice cool wind tunnel.

MC

Fuzzy Curmudgeon said...

They just have too much tonnage. They're cooling the air off so fast, it doesn't have time to wring the humidity out of it. They'd also need to replace the condensing unit and probably the tubing...I'm hoping this is a rooftop unit that could be pulled and replaced as a whole? But even if it's a split system, the investment in replacing it would pay itself off in time in significantly lower electric bills, as you've already pointed out.

I mean, come on, down the street at the churchy-looking building with the tall tower, we replaced most of our light bulbs with LEDs five years ago for around $70K, and in five years we've repaid ourselves already. Someone in your front office isn't using their noodle.

Anonymous said...


Mr. Cajun hit on the answer there in his link, add heat. Sounds counterintuitive, but it actually isn't.

Expensive as all hell, electricity or gas damn sure ain't cheap, but they're Corporate, and they can afford it by tightening their belts some more. (My happy Honda car did it that way, blending engine heat with the A/C for temp control. Kept the cabin dry as a desert, even here in central Floria-Duh.)

Huh? Wha? You say those belts are already way, way overtight? Fear not! They'll take in a notch or three. At the employee's expense of health and sanity, of course...

(Fuzzy makes an excellent point on LED lighting, they *finally* have the crappy blue spectra problem licked, the light is now a gorgeous warm hue, standard home dimmers work on them as well. And the price is far cheaper. Consider converting your home over to LED.)

waepnedmann said...

It has been my experience that the intersection of "happy" and "right" seldom occur on the pale green graph paper of life.

Roberta X said...

Don't have a suitable source of heat. I am hoping things will level out -- but it is, rather emphatically, not my department. They have Top. Men. working on it, not some silly girl engineer.

Anonymous said...


"Don't have a suitable source of heat."

Where does the exhaust air from the transmitter PA finals go? Right there is free heat. Re-route that back indoors, perhaps.

Anyways, best luck to the 'top men' *cough*...

Roberta X said...

Anon 9:33: Exhaust air from the the transmitter PAs is about 10.5 miles away from this room. I don't think the city will let us run ductwork. :)