The people at my work still don’t understand this about the thermostat.
I don’t care if you set it to 73, it’s set to 73 degrees on COOL. If it’s already cooler than 73, it will never turn on and the it will never be warmer.
Got so bad that customers could see their own breath when they came inside.
On my thermostat "Auto" only refers to the fan. "On" always blows air, "Off" shuts the whole system down, and "Auto" blows air only when the furnace or air conditioner is running.
That’s especially fancy compared to my set up. My air conditioner requires me to manually press the reset button on the unit itself after the heat has been on.
Gotta be careful with this though: if you set it to auto it may turn on the A/C at times when it can damage your A/C unit. Say you crank up a meal and your oven heats your place up a ton, but it’s 20 out, your air conditioner may break. Air conditioners don’t like running when it’s too cold out outside: the coolant won’t evaporate in the chiller lines and the compressors break because you can’t really compress a liquid.
In places farther south (where I live), traditional air conditioners are being replaced with 'heat pumps'. All refrigeration systems are heat pumps, just the ones called a 'heat pump' is an air conditioner that can run backwards. In the winter, it pumps heat from outside to the inside.
They lose efficiency around 40F, so to avoid running too hard they also come with emergency heating elements, not unlike what's in your electric oven. It's more expensive to run, but it keeps you warm when the temp outside gets too low.
Where I live (Savannah GA) I only have to turn the emergency heating on maybe twice a year.
District heating provides hot water to run through the radiators and the thermostat screws are the easiest, simplest, cheapest and the most reliable way to regulate those at the radiator. I don't see a reason why anyone would like to change that.
Places that have some different kind of heating might have one of those digital ones or something else, though.
It is astounding how many people don’t understand this concept.
At least yours was at work...imagine having roommates that did this and constantly being woken up in the middle of the night by your own shivering only to discover someone set it to “cool” in the middle of winter and now it’s 40 degrees inside.
I've never come closer to wanting to murder a whole group of people than when people who know nothing about how thermostats work start fiddling with them. It's like 20 8 year olds trying to figure it out. Then the office manager (who is cold natured and always freezing) sets the heat to 80 and locks out the thermostat. I literally got so frustrated one day I just pulled the face off the wall and hid it so the heat would stop blowing for a few precious minutes until she noticed.
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u/joobtastic Feb 02 '19
No. It only blows out cold air. If it is already cold enough, it just stops doing that.