The summer heat is sweltering outside, but indoors it’s way too cold. This is the paradox that afflicts many people in corporate America trudging to their offices.
Office buildings are major consumers of energy, the bulk of which goes toward heating, ventilation, lighting and cooling. And in the middle of a heat wave, with outdoor temperatures crawling past 100 degrees Fahrenheit, it’s odd to want to pull out a sweater.
“We’re overcooling a lot of our office buildings,” said Cliff Majersik, senior adviser at the Institute for Market Transformation, a nonprofit that focuses on increasing energy efficiency. “It’s wasting energy, but it’s also making people uncomfortable.”
Even during the Covid-19 pandemic, when occupancy precipitously dropped, office buildings didn’t use proportionately less energy. While occupancy in New York City office buildings dropped an estimated 60 percent in 2020 from the year before, energy use fell only 14 percent, said a report by the Urban Green Council, a nonprofit dedicated to decarbonization.
But even though energy spending is high and office buildings feel cold to many — and it’s tempting to find a villain in the story — real estate experts say the temperature isn’t the problem.
Often, it’s how efficient the cooling system is, or how sensors and thermostats are manipulated, that turns your cubicle into a mini Arctic tundra.
Setting Comfortable Temperatures
Most of the time during summer, office buildings are set to a temperature of 71 to 73 degrees Fahrenheit, said Jamie Hodari, chief executive of building operations and experience at Coldwell Banker Richard Ellis, one of the largest real estate services firms. But if a building’s cooling system is inefficient, workers may feel colder depending on where they are sitting.
“There’s a way in which this is like the Havana syndrome of the office world, in the sense that so many people subjectively say they have this issue with their office being colder than their home,” Mr. Hodari said, referring to a neurological condition that has no universally accepted medical diagnosis.
Mr. Hodari, who is also the chief executive of Industrious, a shared-workspace services company, said it was possible that while building temperatures were set at a certain level, there might be pockets of cooler and hotter air.
Maybe you sit by a window that doesn’t have good insulation, for example. Maybe a piece of office equipment is operating near a temperature sensor, making the area seem hotter than it is and forcing the system to work harder to cool it down.
The temperature range for office buildings is sometimes included in a tenant’s lease, with set points for winter and summer. Those temperatures can be tweaked — within limits — with software called a “building management system,” typically accessible by facilities operators.
The decision of what that temperature range should be is guided by recommendations by organizations like the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers. ASHRAE sets standards using a highly complex calculation but suggests that temperatures should be comfortable for around 80 percent of occupants.
Cold offices were once attributed to a set temperature calculated for men wearing suits. Mr. Hodari said that was unlikely the explanation today. For one, standards set by organizations like ASHRAE are continually updated and consider factors including clothing, occupant activity level, humidity, air flow, and radiant heat or sunlight.
Office buildings don’t maintain the same temperature for all 24 hours of the day. Between normal working hours, cooling systems relax and raise the base-line temperature to conserve energy — but that means cold air is blasted to bring temperatures back down in the mornings. Even if you hit a sweet spot temperature-wise, buildings have to continuously circulate air to maintain a certain quality, which is why vents continue to blow air.
Better Systems, Same People
Darrin Bacon, senior director for engineering compliance at CBRE, who has worked with HVAC systems for over three decades, said that heating and cooling systems had become increasingly efficient and precise over the years — but that people hadn’t changed.
“It’s always the case that you’ll have people who aren’t comfortable in commercial settings,” he said. “People personally experience temperatures so different from each other.”
Mr. Bacon said he was tweaking building temperatures all the time, based on a multitude of factors, including the weather.
“It’s really hard to take a building and make it do something different than what Mother Nature is doing,” he said.
Mr. Majersik from the Institute for Market Transformation said heating and cooling buildings with heat pumps — which don’t use fossil fuels — would be one way to improve energy efficiency. Buildings should also work toward more personalized temperature controls, he added.
“Right now, a lot of these buildings are overcooled because you have to set one thermostat for either the whole building or maybe the whole floor,” Mr. Majersik said. “That means that if one person wants it to be 65 degrees, then another person wants it to be 80 degrees, they can’t both be happy because they have to be more or less the same temperature.”
More precise temperature controls, which allow individuals to control their own office or even their own cubicle, will not only increase comfort but also save energy, he said.
Some modern offices are doing exactly that. JPMorgan Chase’s new headquarters building, which opened last year at 270 Park Avenue in Manhattan, has a far more sophisticated heating and cooling system. On its trading floor, an “underfloor air delivery system” includes “swirl diffusers” that allow traders to set and adjust the temperature where they sit, a JPMorgan spokesman said. The building also operates at net-zero emissions.
The next frontier for building energy efficiency could be systems managed by artificial intelligence, Mr. Bacon of CBRE said.
Until now, building operations systems had to be good at self-regulating and needed people to oversee changes when needed. But A.I. can analyze variables like the weather on the same date last year to make predictions about what temperature setting may work best for a given day.
Mr. Bacon hasn’t seen any operations management system fully integrate A.I. yet, but he has rolled out a test program on a project to see how it goes.
“So far, it’s been really, really positive,” he said.
