Too hot or too cold, office battle over who controls the air con thermostat

ON Monday morning I was sent an email link to an article printed on the BBC website by a colleague suggesting that I might just be interested in reading it.

Curious I clicked on it to find an article titled - ‘ The never ending battle over the best office temperature’.

I think somebody is trying to tell me something here.

Indeed office temperature is a never ending battle in this and every other office.

I admit guilt on this count. As I am normally first in the door in the morning, I switch on the lights, switch on the air conditioning, switch on the radio, switch on the kettle and boot up my desktop. A lot of electricity at the flick of a switch.

The control panel for the air conditioning is just inside the door and when you first enter our newsroom in the morning you can really feel the hit of heat from the big glass office windows.

The air con brings the office temperature down couple of degrees within minutes.

However that same control panel is the epi-centre of a battle throughout the day.

Everyone coming or going through the door normally tweaks it to their liking. Too hot, too cold.

During the winter months the air con is still a battleground. We have storage heaters in the office and they are not quick responders if it is too hot or too cold, so the air con is used to quickly bring about the desired temperature control.

We are not alone in our battle and in our own front office, a similar war rages on a different front.

At home, windows, the timer and the thermostat are regular battle grounds over whether it is too hot or too cold.

There are exceptions, but it does seem to our experience that the battleground falls between the sexes with the males usually looking to cool the ambient temperature and females looking to turn up the dial.

So what is the best office temperature? It’s impossible to say, but it’s likely to lie somewhere between 22 and 24°C (71.6 – 75.2F), according to Shipworth quoted in the BBC article while apparently there’s a legal minimum working temperature in most countries (16°C in the UK, 60.8F).

The air con war will continue throughout the summer unless we get another few weeks of sweltering temperatures, when a ceasefire will reign.