Every office building I've worked in and most I have visited struggles with HVAC design flaws so absurdly stupid, it makes me wonder whether that profession has any competence.

The office space my employer recently moved into was totally gutted and refitted for our move-in, including all new duct work and thermostats.

The large zone within that space that includes my cubical, has its thermostat located in an outside corner on a large metal pillar exposed to direct sunlight. Several ducts have very little flow and only a single duct in the zone has good flow. Of course that is the one at the inside corner of the zone furthest from the thermostat.

The pillar is hot from the sun. The thermostat senses 78 degrees even though the air in that corner is low 70's. Center of the zone (half way between the one working duct and the thermostat) is 66 degrees. Under the duct is brutally cold. The next zones on either side of this zone are running heat to balance the cold air coming into them from this zone. The whole thing is of course locked so the engineers suffering from the bad design won't try to adjust anything to compensate.

I guess I'll start wearing a sweater at work. That is much easier than dealing with the insanity of most of my previous offices, which were far too hot in both winter and summer due to similar stupid errors of installation.

I understand that people in general are staggeringly stupid, and thinking like an engineer is rare even among engineers. But do HVAC installations really need to be so often worse than random? The only worse place in the entire zone to place that thermostat would have been directly under the one strong duct (causing the system to shut off too soon in the winter and freeze everyone maybe worse than now).

You get what you pay for. Cheap pay equals cheap work. Most of these types of companies are there only for the paycheck. If you don't hold their hand they are going to think about what is best but what saves them the most money which translates into bigger payday fro them.

My personal beef with the typical HVAC and Plumbing contractor, especially in residential construction, was the way they would saw a large chunk out of a joist or beam to make room for their duct or pipes. If you cut 2 inches out of the bottom of a 2x8 joist, especially within the middle third of its span, you have reduced its entire capacity to that of a 2x6, which has about half the carrying capacity of a 2x8.

I managed to have worse luck than that in my choice of contractor. While gutting and rebuilding a bathroom (as part of a much larger project), the contractor reached into the space under the floor of the adjoining bathroom (that wasn't being modified) and cut completely through the joists in order to have enough room to redo the connection of the waste pipes of the bathroom being redone into the lines of the other bathroom.

Where the original pipes had run through holes drilled in joists (leaving no access to disconnect and reconnect them) the new pipes ran through empty space. Where the original floor of the unmodified bathroom had been supported by joists, it was instead supported entirely by the old cast iron drain pipe under the toilet of the old bathroom. I did not know any of that until after the contractor was paid and immediately declared bankruptcy.

Years later (after only modest sagging of the unsupported floor) I hired someone else to gut and refinish the bathroom that wasn't supposed to be modified the first time. After ripping out the floor, he needed to assemble replacement joists around the pipes with a lot of gluing. Where you would normally install a joist first, drill holes and fit the pipes through, he needed to use four half height joists, with notches cut where the pipes would fit, then glue the four joists together, two under the pipe and two above (double width needed to compensate for the loss of strength created by all the cutting and gluing). That whole process needed to be repeated three times for the three joists completely cut by the original contractor.

So I understand (from that first experience) how a homeowner can get deceived on reference checks and ripped off by an unscrupulous contractor who takes an illegal shortcut to save effort on what otherwise would be a difficult job.

But when a big company (my employer) hires a major HVAC company for big bucks, and the installer does absurdly stupid things that are no less effort than doing it right, there is a level of stupidity in play that is fundamentally different from a residential contractor doing a job wrong to reduce effort.

Thinking, "If it doesn't immediately collapse, it must be OK."

Another difference is that with your residence you can do it yourself, which is what I finally learned to do. But with a large commercial building, that option doesn't usually exist.

I once worked in a building where one of the zones had three thermostats.

One was in a meeting room called the "fishbowl," because it had windows all the way around. The other was in the man cubicle area. The third was in the VP's office.

In the summer, the fishbowl would get hot if there were more than three persons in a meeting, so they would turn the thermostat down. The main cubicle area was usually cool, so they would turn thermostat up. The VPs windows faced south, so he would turn the thermostat down. (In the winter, the dynamic was slightly different.)

The system was failsafe. It always responded to the setting that was certain to make the largest number of persons possible uncomfortable.

The stupid. It burns.

Your building should have invested in a dude like me.
One who can move thermostats and do custom preventative maintenance on the building to keep things purring.

But that requires caring. Something business is incapable of in my experience.

Not so much the contractors fault, per se. More of a business/capitalistic mind set, no?

I used to maintain prison a/c units and PM the whole prison with the plumbing to central control and door locks, etc.......

But moved on to my own thing when I got tired of peoples attitudes. All people.
You are just a victim of a larger mind set that you seem to be unaware of.
It is not just the contractors.

My current residence used to be hospital in the 1950's. They built things a bit better with better materials but the cast iron drains and cloth insulated electrical wiring is being a bit of a bitch. The 3 phase 5 ton A/C unit I Siamesed in with the Central Heating furnace purrs like a kitten on a 115F day. My M/C shop office Window mounted A/C unit is my friend on these days also.

So wear some overalls with some thermal under wear showing to work. They might get the idea then.

I'm sure the person they hired also says that.

There is a factor of big company mismanagement in play here. Internal service depts, such as facilities management are "graded" on metrics that typically entirely omit any consideration of how their actions impact the revenue generating depts.

But I still think there is a fundamental stupidity of the installers in play as well. How can they be in that business and fail to understand the most glaring issues in duct layout and thermostat positioning.

I still don't understand what led to the way my house was constructed. It was built in the 1960's but had some cast iron drain pipes and some cloth insulated wiring. The house I grew up in was built in 1955 and had only copper pipes and had more modern wiring.

This office is in Massachusetts and the people making all the facilities decisions are in Pennsylvania. I don't think they would deduce anything from the way I dress anyway. But far less so, since they'll never see it.

I forgot again to bring a sweater in. It is difficult getting up early in the morning after a night trying to sleep in a bedroom that is too warm, to remember that I'll need a sweater at work.

I can't even figure out what is wrong with the stupid system today myself. In the hot sun yesterday morning, the pillar that thermostat is on was hot and the thermostat said it was calling for more A/C even though the zone was very cold. Today is cloudy. That pillar is cold. That thermostat is in the narrow range neither calling for heat nor calling for A/C. All the surrounding thermostats are calling for heat. But all the air coming out of all the vents in all the zones is cold (which is why the office is cold enough on a warm day for the thermostats to call for heat).

haha, after reading this i turned around wondering if one of you guys is sitting in my office posting this.

I have a room that is smaller than 20' x 20' and has the supply and return ducts randomly placed in the ceiling. And the dedicated ac to this room is rated 10-20 tons but it can barely flow 5 tons worth of air through the duct to the room.

my experience is that it's not total stupidity on the contractors part installing the system but more so cutting corners and fraud, and the paying company not being knowledgeable about the work done knowing they're being cheated. once the job is done, if they turn the thermostat on and any amount of cool air comes out any vent it's considered a success that's all the customer (company) knows. and the bigger the company the worse they get bamboozled, and a system that costs $x in a residential setting that may go for 1.5x in a small commercial setting somehow becomes $3x or $5x in large commercial.

. . . and remember that many companies are in leased quarters, even though they may have been there a long long time.

The landlord invested in the building, not in its tenants.

Hi,

When one depends on others for design for climate control then they get what they pay for. Zone control can be done efficiently but overall things do depend on the engineer for that project. At what level do you desire the system to be. Cost effective or comfort? Most companies will pour money into the project that may be suitable but not efficient. Does the system have hot zones or cold zones? How to balance that system? Chill box or compressor based? Revamp or new? Cost to do this?

As I said, "You get what you pay for"! Competency of the designer/engineer. Not all are equivalent. I know PE certified engineers who could not pour piss out of boot, even if the instructions were on the heel.

That's a good one for the quotes thread.

I did work for some very professional groups when I was a young man installing commercial HVAC systems. Helped install one of the first smart systems in town. It's tasks were as good as any today with the exception of internet weather input.

When I was hired where I am now, the building was built under Carter energy mandates and had a smart system for hvac and lighting. All of that had been disabled. I couldn't get anyone to put it back at my level.

As in all things, they don't let you install the best systems. Owners may write in standards like, they want to see the t-stats in halls. Code issues to maintain distances, to wiring limits.

I'd assume this is a new can type or even IP based. They are pretty easy to move. Just move it.

When I first saw it attached to a major steel support column, I expected it to be RF and easy to move.

I'm not very knowledgeable on office building construction. But I was still amazed to see that column must be hollow and there is a hole drilled into it and the wires run inside. Last office had dry wall wrapped around the steal columns and wires run between the dry wall and the steel. This one just has painted steel, which gets very hot when the sun is hitting it in the office above and quite cold at other times.

The thermostat is new, but of an old design same as I put in my house 20 years ago. It is certainly not IP. It has heat, cool and ground wires. The one at home is wired in a way that lets the thermostat steal some power from the signal wires so the batteries last longer. The one here is wired to run on battery power at all times and the signal wires are just signal. Anyway, the way the wires were run makes moving it way beyond what is OK for an unauthorized facilities modification by a software engineer.

A good thread to read in an office where the thermostat has been optimized for six warm bodies, but alas there has been only mine for the past 3 years. Luckily the space heater at my feet counters the AC vent right over my head....