Between the posted notices, and the unpleasant heat and humidity of today, I’m sure you’ve noticed the A/C was turned off. It’s pretty obvious today was a terrible day to do that. The A/C will be turned back on tomorrow.
A little over a week ago, when I’d originally proposed the switch from the A/C to heat (with a week in between for the pipe temperatures to “normalize”), the forecast showed a temperature peak last week, before consistently dropping off this week. The reality, however, is that since then, the forecast has changed, and we’re looking at consistent temperatures 10° or more greater than when the plan was made.
The policy should be to do one last evaluation of the forecast, before switching from A/C or heat, and that clearly didn’t happen. I could point the finger, but if you want someone to blame, feel free to blame me.
As I said above, the A/C will be turned back on tomorrow, Tuesday, October 10th, 2017. The plan being to switch off next Monday, but not until after we’ve reevaluated the temperatures! If we don’t see them dropping, we’ll push it back again, and repeat this process.
For those of you who are wondering why we can’t just switch it back and forth for hot days and cold days, or why we need a week between transitions, I’ll clarify that we, for better or worse, have a single line water based system. In a water based system, if you rapidly change the temperature of the water in the pipes, you risk causing something called “thermal shock”, and rupturing the line. This is bad, for obvious reasons, and means that we can’t have heating or cooling until the problem is fixed. While I’d never suggest anyone build such a system for multiple units in modern times, back in the 60s, when these buildings were built as apartments, we didn’t get a say. There is, arguably, one benefit, in that such a system is more cost effect, but it’s certainly more inconvenient to everyone who relies on it, especially when shaded ground floor units on one end of the property can be 20° cooler than top floor units exposed to the sun all day (like my own).
Anyway, I hope we can avoid these sorts of inconveniences moving forward, and would recommend you close up your windows if you’re leaving for work in the morning, so you can fully benefit from the A/C.