Freezing again

[altivo]

After freezing all afternoon. I've mentioned before, I'm sure, the fact that the heating and cooling system in the library is about as reliable as if it had been designed by Helmut Jahn himself. It breaks down constantly, and our annual repair and maintenance bills run to thousands and thousands of dollars. Well, the heat has been out in the staff work area for several days. Now this isn't as extreme as it sounds, because the other zones are working so they keep it from getting much below 67 or 68F in there, but with the dry air circulating that still feels more like 58 to me. I dress as warmly as possible, and still get shivers. Supposedly it's fixed now, we'll see how it is on Friday. I won't be there tomorrow because I'm going to the dentist.

I don't really mind going to see the dentist but I hate the drive to get there. I really should switch to someone out here, but I like my dentist and have been going to her for at least 18 years now. She's not right in Chicago, but just on the western edge, about 45 miles from here.

Still have some Christmas shopping to do, mainly for Gary's family, his two brothers and their wives and sons, and his mom. Shouldn't be too hard, I just have to get it done. The two kids get cash because I have no idea what to buy for 21 year olds, so that's easy enough.

We had leftovers from the birthday feast tonight, and it was all just as good the second time around. Tomorrow Gary will be at his mom's so I'll be on my own. At least it's supposed to warm up a bit.

Comments

[cabcat.livejournal.com]

Sounds like the one for our entire building, it's never worked right since the building was built. Me and a few others are seriously considering getting into the workings to try and fix it ourselves...we couldn't do worse honestly.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

This thing is just a stupid design. It has four zones, which is good, but the pieces that are supposed to control each zone are scattered all over the place and put together with leftover parts, I swear. Lots of pumps and fans run by pulleys and rubber belts located in inaccessible places. The belts are always breaking or popping off the pulleys.

And the master control? It's a PC running Windows ME. You know how reliable that would be. No, it can't be upgraded to XP, because their software doesn't run on XP. And it has one of those hardware dongle things plugged into the printer port. When rebooted, often it insists it can't find the dongle and disables the entire system. As if they needed a dongle when it's all specific to their climate control hardware. I'm sure every gamer in the world wants to "steal" that junk. Not.

Supposedly you can downgrade the PC to Windows 98 and it will run better, but of course there are no specific instructions for getting the software and configuration off it and back on, so I'm not touching it.

[cabcat.livejournal.com]

Belt run fans o.O No inline fans. Why the freak does it need a dongle??

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Beats me. Because the people who wrote the software were idiots, is my guess. The heating and cooling system is a huge dongle on its own, and the software won't do anything else useful.

[mondhasen.livejournal.com]

Our Director decided it would be less costly to let the heat ramp up to the upper 70's in our lower level than to have our HVAC people make another visit. Our system is a hybrid of the original 1915 steam radiators converted to forced hot water, coupled with a computerized 'new' system installed in 2004 in selected areas of the original building and throughout the new addition. Glad I'm on vacation now!

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Ugh. Yeah, ours has a tendency to let these problems ride as long as possible because they always turn out to be very expensive and the fix never stays fixed for long it seems.