Wait… I thought this was completely normal? Right now (9:20am Weds 3rd November 2021) the outside air temp is 4.5 and the temperature in the room is 18 degrees and it’s very pleasant. I certainly wouldn’t want it to be much warmer. This isn’t a dig at them, I just thought this was what most people did?
For the rest of it, I wish them all the best. Based on my own food experiments, I think they’ll find the food pledges to be tricky to outright unworkable- certainly Jan-March- but the rest of it is laudable.
18c is too cold for most folk. Home central heating systems are usually set at 20-22c. In an office invironment it’s even higher 21-23c, so the ladies can sit at their desks wearing thin tops.
The heating wars in our office were on a par with the aircon wars.
Working in a predominately female populated office it was always bloody tropical and the aircon was rarely switched on
Over winter 2018/19, the glorified shed I was living in post divorce needed vast amounts of (PAYG) electricity to even make it to 18 degrees. I’m guessing that, my generally corpulent build and fondness for knitwear means I feel my current digs are perfect at 18 degrees.
We used to have three active set points, each controlling different air con/heating units across the office. The opportunity for trolling the other half of the office was endless. Set of to 16 while theirs is set to 21, this would see very hot air blowing in their general direction as the systems fought against eachother. Happy days. No fun anymore as a single control only.
18C is definitely at the bottom end of comfortable for me, but that’s probably because I have a sedentary job and without exercising my core temp drops too much for it to be pleasant. There’s also a definite gender difference. Women (I’m generalising) prefer a higher temp - think duvet wars.
Our house is set at 18.5C daytime and 20C evening and 15.5 overnight minimum.
Our office / workshop regularly hits 30 in the winter and 35+ in the summer (Think Troppo). This is not because we work from the balcony of the Raffles Hotel but rather as the space is above a T-shirt printing co that uses heat presses.
The central heating system is either on or off (There is no way to set temp and the radiators have been painted so often everything is seized) The windows can’t be opened as they are likely to fall out.
I had hoped the sweat lodge approach to work might help to loose some weight but instead it simply induces napping with occasional bouts of tropical arousal…
Office is regularly 25c (or more) as because of usual Civil Service purchasing they bought the minimum AC system possible and 5 years of data centre expansion now means that 99.999999% of the AC is dedicated to the data centre.
A highly-laudable list
Quite gratified to see that we already tick about 85% of it.
Some of it is effectively inapplicable - we don’t fly anywhere since dogs, 'cos no way I’d dump 'em in kennels.
The food thing is easy, as I can walk out the door and buy fairly diverse fruit and veg grown on our doorstep, plus we get more brassics, leeks and spuds than we know what to do with thanks to Sam’s job, and our garden provides more fruit and herbs than we can use.
It’s very rare that I ever throw food away. I cannot emphasise too much that ‘best before’ dates are very conservative, and chiefly a sales-tool of supermarkets.
Vehicles, we could do better, but I barely drive anywhere any more, and gratuitously replacing vehicles with new - low output or not - is a source of more pollution than keeping older vehicles running efficiently for as long as possible.
Both our vehicles have been extensively rustproofed, and in time the truck will be retrofitted with an all electric powertrain to replace the diseasel.
I’m already managing the paddock and garden for wildlife, and given we now have foxes, rabbits and deer among much else in the garden (way more in the paddock), it’s working well.
It’s easy for us mind, given our location.
Pets are something that needs consideration. It’s hard to avoid the fact that predators as pets are ecologically disastrous - their diet is mostly meat, albeit that ‘meat’ is almost entirely the byproduct of processing carcases for human consumption that would otherwise go to landfill.
Oh yeah, 17.5 degrees C for the thermostat. And we are planning on flouting listed building status by installing replacement glazing that is double and triple panel, depending on visibility. HUGE amounts of heat are lost through our windows, and that HAS to change.
