Temperature Control

When living with multiple people, you have to make sacrifices on temperature control.  In many situations, the temperature is chosen by someone not living in the building.  Here, we have remotes to change the temperature to whatever our hearts desire, but when you are crammed in a small room with others we have to compromise on thermostat adjustments.  In my room, I have decided to just deal with whatever temperature my roommates set, until they leave.

When I lived in barracks, the temperature was controlled by maintenance.  If it was too hot in your room, you opened a window.  If it was too cold, you bundled up as best you could.  When I was living in the new barracks in New Jersey, we had thermostats in our rooms.  We could choose our temperature until management announced the system could not handle the various temperatures and locked our thermostats.

Here, each room has its own climate control system complete with remote.  Our thermostat reads in Degrees Celsius and at first it was hard to judge to what temperature we were actually setting the system. 

It is amazing to see how people make adjustments to the thermostat when not living in their own home.  For example, depending on how one of my roommates is feeling, our temperature changes.  If she has just completed the long walk back from work and is hot from the trip, she will walk in and turn air conditioner on.  If she is cold, she will turn the heat on to 38 (100F).  My other roommate is somewhat passive on room temperature, but if it is too hot or cold for her she will make small adjustments to the temperature, not drastic changes like the other roommate.  On multiple occasions I will walk into the room and the thermostat is set on heat to 27 (80F).  The room feels like it is on fire, but I crawl under my covers and wait until they leave to turn it to 21 (70F).  My thoughts are that they wouldn’t be doing all this drastic temperature changing in their homes…or would they?

What brings this up is that I was snuggly sleeping with the thermostat on 21 today when my roommate shows up and changes it to 17 (62F) and walks out of the room.  I woke up when she changed it because the system beeps when you push the remote buttons.  When she left, I peeked to see where she set it and a look of shock came to my face.  I quickly changed it back to 21 before she got back, and I don’t think she ever noticed.  I don’t think she really cared because when she came back she gathered some items and left again to grab lunch with her friends. 

At work, I usually turn off the climate control system around 11pm and turn it back on around 6am when shift change is close to arriving.  I like the temperature warm, but I don’t want to make it too warm for my NCO.  The day crew runs the air conditioner all day, but there are a lot of people in this small office and the sun warms the building, so it is understandable.  At night, the cold seeps through the plywood walls quite effectively, but not enough to encourage me to turn on the heat.  In time, we will have to turn on the heat, but today is not that day.