The library has some heavy-duty air conditioning. Come the height of summer, that is quite welcome. There isn’t much need to lower the temperature artificially, however, when it’s uncomfortably cool outside, as it is today: about 64°F, breezy and drizzly. There’s no need at all to lower the temperature artificially below that.b
Yet the A/C is pounding away today, keeping the library a frosty 62°F. I can’t make up my mind which of two problems is to blame, but they’re both stupid. Possibility one: the central air is programmed to keep the temperature below an expected outside value, rather than keep it within a fixed target range. Possibility two: the air conditioning is set to run between certain dates, regardless of what the weather may be like on those dates.
Neither case is wholly nonsensical. You see such behavior a lot in old heating systems. In the first case, the regulator is so old as to be mechanical, and allowing the target temperature to vary with the strain on the system presented by the outside conditions is cheaper than aiming for a fixed target. In the second case, the expense of firing up the boiler only to shut it off again a day later, or vice versa, is greater than the expense of running it needlessly, or the inconvenience of a few days’ over- or under-heating.
But these systems are not wholly nonsensical in the context of the industrial age, when control systems were crude, mechanical devices, insensitive to small changes, difficult to design so as to handle multiple variables, prone to getting stuck or broken when designed to be too responsive. Isn’t this the information age? A generation or three after electronics became widely available? Even granting that the library’s temperature control may be old, it isn’t that old. World War II had electrical control systems. By now, even if the original control system depended on wires and circuit breakers, it should be easy enough—and cheap enough—to replace all such systems with a microchip with more processing power than the world’s largest calculating machine back when the original system was built. Programmable. Able to handle numerous variables: target temperatures that vary by date, by outside conditions, by time of day, by time since the last adjustment, by what flavor of ice cream the current administrator likes—anything. And any or all of them in combination.
So why the hell is it so cold in here?
