Though spring is officially two weeks off, the weather is spring-like. Old Man Winter has been reduced to some rapidly shrinking crusts of filth and ice, remnants of the blizzard that hit us just over a week ago. This is important, because the MSU library, where I’m writing this, is <i>frick</i>in’ hot. It seems MSU operates on one of those schedules, common to schools and other public buildings low on the government food chain, wherein the date for turning the heat and/or air conditioning on and off is set in stone a year or more ahead of time and remains in that state until the equally arbitrary forecast for the weather change a half year hence.
I have never understood this policy. It’s typically explained as a cost-cutting measure, bound by an extra expense of firing up and/or shutting down the furnace. Okay. I don’t understand why this procedure should be so expensive, but let us take it as given. That explains why the furnace should be turned on only once a year, and turned off only once, as well. It still doesn’t explain why shutting the furnace down <i>now</i>, with the weather warm enough to make it unnecessary, and no significant chance that it will be necessary before next autumn, should be more expensive than shutting down <i>later</i>, after several weeks of running needlessly. Quite the reverse. In fact, this could be the most expensive time to run the furnace, because staff and students open office and dormitory windows, trying to get some breathable air, forcing the furnaces to labor to heat the outdoors as well as the indoors.
Operating the system on this sort of calendar is an example of “garbage in, garbage out,†the principle that a mathematical system can produce no more accurate a result than the information that goes into it; in this case, the prediction of the ideal date to turn off the furnace so as to minimize costs can be no more accurate than, among other variables, the prediction of the weather. Weather predictions for the next week are notoriously unreliable; for a year or more ahead of time, you might as well throw darts blindfold at a calendar. Optimization theory is my bailiwick, and, while not universally true in the strictest mathematical sense, I guarantee that turning off the furnace at about the time it looks like it’s unnecessary, rather than trying to guess blind, will be close enough to the optimum solution for rock and roll. (Or, heh-heh, government work.) Even a sudden and unexpected turn of cold weather, at this time of year, isn’t going to last long enough, nor be severe enough, to make turning the furnaces on again necessary. At worst, the buildings will be as uncomfortably cold as they are now uncomfortably hot. No loss. And every likelihood of a gain.
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