Have you checked your air conditioning works?
A long time ago I was sat in my office watching the temperature rise gradually and, to be honest, enjoying it immensely. It had been a long and cold winter and it was good to see the sun out for a change so nobody was really complaining. It was the fifth really hot day in a row and so we lapped it up.
These were the days when the main company computer sat in its own room, air conditioned, with access via a keypad.
Then an alarm went off. The air conditioning had failed in the computer room and the temperature was rising. Computers seemed to run incredibly hot in those days and if you didn’t cool them down, things would start to go wrong very quickly.
What could we do?
We headed down to the computer room and opened all the windows as a first step which didn’t really help, it was about 28C outside, a bit warmer than inside so it probably made things worse so then someone had the bright idea of bringing a load of fans in from the offices — it’s an emergency we said.
And then we learned a very important aspect of physics, fans and the circulation of air. You see, fans don’t cool rooms down at all, in fact, they probably increase the temperature of a room because a fan just moves air around. They cool people down because people sweat and when the air from a fan hits you it blows the moisture away which in turn takes heat with it and therefore you feel cooler. Unfortunately, large computers don’t sweat all that much.
All we did then was heat the room up a little bit more.
Then it was a quick call to a local air conditioning company. “Could you get a portable air conditioning unit here today?”
The answer was a laugh followed by “you know it’s 28C and rising for the rest of the week, yeah? I’m afraid we’re all out of them”
Luckily, this was a big company and we had resources so due to some major string-pulling we managed to get an engineer to come out and fix it. It took a while though and to be sure nothing got damaged, we turned everything off for a few hours.
The moral of this story? Well, you may think that because of the horrible weather and pouring rain that you don’t need to worry about your air conditioning, but before you know it we’ll (hopefully) we basking in wonderful sunshine and sub-tropical temperatures so check your air conditioning now. If you do find it needs a service or even replacement, you’ll discover it’s easier and cheaper to get it done during the winter months.
This article originally appeared in:
http://www.theofficesuppliessupermarket.com/articles/have-you-checked-your-air-conditioning-works
