Word: thermostatic
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Heat over the Thermostat...
...owner of Jasper's Restaurant in Kansas City. "They're wet by the middle of the evening. It's destroying everything I've worked for." At the St. Louis offices of the Arthur Andersen & Co. accounting firm, a senior officer reported: "We just turned the thermostat down. In a couple days they'll come around and turn it up, but then we'll turn it back down again." Insisted a liquor-store owner in Boston: "When they turn the air conditioning off in the White House, then I'll turn up my thermostat...
...dining rooms can be cooler. Supermarkets, too, can qualify for exceptions on the grounds that their perishable foods in open cases must be refrigerated; to raise the storewide temperature would mean having to increase the refrigeration, with little, if any, net energy conservation. Generally, it is not the thermostat in buildings that must be set at 78°; it is the recorded temperature in the warmest area of a centrally controlled set of rooms that must not be less than...
Personal inconveniences aside, Carter's edict has also raised complaints from engineers. Merely setting the thermostat at 80° F, they argue, may actually waste energy. Many air-conditioning systems have not been designed to work efficiently and humidify properly at such levels. Matters are further complicated by "the solar load": as the sun moves around the building, room temperatures inside can rise by as much as 5° F. "You can't just set office thermostats like you do those in a home," explains Larry Wethers, a building-systems assistant for Chicago's 110-story Sears...
...spend part of his time waving at passersby. Preparing for the Vienna summit, secretaries in the office of Zbigniew Brzezinski, National Security Adviser, doused all their lights to reduce the heat. One senior White House official, after closing his door so no one would see, tried to jimmy his thermostat, which was locked at 80°. He broke...