snow-ho-ho

God, it's cold.

The building where I work is appalling during the winter.  We're all upstairs and it's a reasonably-sized open-plan office.  However, it has lots of glass windows, many of which are not particularly well sealed.  There's also no-one downstairs, so there's not much in the way of 'rising heat' effect.  Also, the insulation in the roof is very poor - I once poked my head up there and it's very thin indeed. 

The plumbing is also clearly a mess - some of the radiators don't get hot at all and those that do can be erratic, not being as warm as they should be.  Also there are lots of squares for lights and they're obviously un-insulated.  The boiler is also pathetic.  Well, it seems pathetic compared to the old one, which packed up a few years ago.  The old one used to get the radiators so hot you couldn't touch them, where this one doesn't achieve that.

My guess is that if the plumbing was decent, the rooms divided up more, there was proper insulation in the roof and the building better occupied then the boiler would be okay.  As all these aren't the case, the place ends up freezing.

Indeed, the room is generally so cold that we end up putting on a fan-heater to warm it up.  This, obviously, is expensive, and ironic, since a part of the reason it's cold is because the boss has set the heating up in such a way that she's clearly trying to save money.

The heating is almost totally off across the weekend (I believe it does a couple of hours to prevent the pipes freezing).  This means that early at the start of the week the building is particularly cold and it's often mid-week before we've compensated for that.  In other words we have to have the fan-heater on full blast, which surely defeats the point of the "money saving" of having it off at the weekend.

It's also been set so that it only comes on at about 8AM.  Now I get in early, but if you assume a 9AM start then that's only 1 hour of pre-heating.  It also turns off around lunch-time for a couple of hours.  This one seems bizarre to me - okay, that's generally the warmest part of the day, but by letting the building cool the heating then has to work extra hard to bring it back up to temperature when it comes back on.  It also means the fan-heater stays on all day.

It also decided to snow here.  I was watching the forecasts quite keenly over the weekend and none of them showed it snowing here.  I mean, it's not deep - about an inch or so, but settling makes everything that little bit more difficult than it otherwise would be.