Air conditioned offices ... pro's and con's, please.

I used to look after air condition in a very large office,three floors and
200 hormonal women.............................................
It was fully adjustable ,but it was impossible to please everybody.
The guys all wore suits and ties and the girls very often wore skimpy tops in summer(very nice).
There lies part of the problem......so I can imagine all over Britain at the moment there is moaning and groaning.....
You love it or hate it, but it IS a godsend to most WHEN you get it right.

 

One of the last projects I worked on was a major major offices project (approx. 300 staff) and the client opted not to install air conditioning for green reasons (but I suspected mean reasons) and it was designed with an atrium to act as a chimney and provide natural ventilation (with complicated control gear that also had to close everything in the event of a fire) and brise-soleil were fitted externally to reduce solar gain. Never got to find out how effective it was.

 

Folk complaining about too hot / too cold have not worked in an office with properly designed climate control. Why companies want to skimp on design & building costs to then pay-through-the-nose for operating/running costs - for the lifetime of the building!! - beats me. If all the staff are at just the right temperature they will be far more productive ...

There should be absolutely no need to open a window. Far better air quality will be achieved through a (proper!!) mechanical ventilation system, one of the key benefits of which is that the exhaust air goes through a heat-exchanger with the incoming air meaning that energy-loss is negligible. On top of that insulating the building to Passive House standards means that the building needs negligible heating or cooling inputs.

Peak demand for heat (in a passive house) is 10W / sq.m. and in hot countries the cooling requirement is about the same. The average 3 bedroom house is about 100sq.m. so to heat the whole house at peak you would need a 1-bar-fire. Way less than the normal central heating boilers which are installed [in non-Passive Houses] which are usually around the 30kW mark

 

Interesting points of view and well presented, so thank you all for your input.

Good question.
I raised the debate because I work in an office where the issue of using the aircon has been a bone of contention pre-me.
For the past 6-7 weeks it has been on almost constantly.
I wanted to hear others experiences/opinions because I have been getting unusual symptoms subsequently. In my mind, I was thinking it may have its roots in the air conditioning being on, but, not having much experience of an air conditioned office, I had no basis for that train of thought.
The posts on here have certainly given me food for (further) thought

 

Dunno how feasible it is for an office, with no evening / night time occupancy, but in our house (very well insulated, and very high thermal-mass), we keep it at a very plesant temperature by:

All windows closed during the day (no hot air enters)
(Internal surfaces heat where the sun shines on them, some heat enters through the insulated walls/roof)
Open all windows in the evening, and leave open [where possible] over night
(this reduces the temperature, and allows the thermal mass to radiate heat - i.e. to cool down)
Close the windows again in the morning.

Temperature in the house is low 20's C right now, and its been about 30C outside today ...

 

Following on from @Kristen 's advice, on the home front: -
- keep the curtains/blinds drawn on south facing windows during the day
- grow deciduous plants to give shade on south facing windows during the heat of the summer, but to gain maximum light during the winter.

We have two, double glazed, "letter box" windows in our office (way above head height) and lots of phones/computers/monitors/bodies that keep the temperature at maximum levels *without* the air-con running.

 

I always worked in a/c offices in the US and the UK and never had a cold or the 'flu and needless to say I've never had anything living here for 13 years. T'other half however had a stonker of a cold every year at Christmas/New Year and was off work ... ill on his holidays ... but has had only one minor cold here since.

We have had a/c in the kitchen/diner for quite a number of years now but it is only turned on when we hit 30c ... that's when the chicadas come out to play! Last year we had a/c / heating units put in the bedrooms (joint unit) but it only went on two weeks ago in our bedroom an hour before we go to bed and set at 21c. Last night our low was 20c ... our highs have been 32c. We do live in an old cottage with 60cm thick clay walls so it is lovely and cool in the summer (like our witchert house was in Bucks).

We also have a/c cars even though one is a convertible ... hard to explain why one would do that ... ie, roof down but a/c on ...

We also have overhead fans in all rooms which are utilised.

I would not want to be in the UK in the heat.

Just giving some perspectives and views from a hot country (and in the US it was Alabama and hotter than Portugal and colder than the UK).

 

Your wish ... has been granted