My office is the only room in the entire building that has been finished. Lucky me! The floors are sanded and refinished, it was re-plastered, painted, and is the only room with window trim. The only thing that this room is lacking is HEAT (which is funny since we are a HVAC Engineering firm). The conference room below me had its baseboard lines cut too.
We purchased a sexy new Runtal Radiator with a thermostat, valve fittings, and all the bells and whistles needed to hook it up back in the fall. It is all sitting right here here in my office, leaning up against the wall - ready to go. We have been waiting for the basement slab to be installed before hiring a plumber to come in a hook it up since marching around in the basement in a half foot of slippery mud is a less than ideal work environment.
Needless to say, my room has been a little chilly. Warmth from the rest of the building does not quite migrate its way over to my little office the way that I had hoped it would. When i get to work in the morning, the temp will be in the low 60s which might as well be sub-zero when you are sitting still in a chair all day.
Keep in mind that this room is wrapped in 3" of continuous insulation at the walls and 6" at the roof, just like the rest of the building. I had hoped that maybe the load in this room would be so low that I would be able to survive from the warmth from the rest of the building. Ehh... Almost. As good as the enclosure is in this room, it is still has 3 decent sized R-3 windows. When I use my wizard stick smoke generator and blow a puff of smoke at the window, you can see the smoke get sucked into the convective loop at the surface of the glass and the smoke runs down the surface of the window like a waterfall.
You can see in the table above that the load from the 3 windows in this room is just about equal to the load of the entire roof! This just goes to show that windows are bad bad bad insulators.
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To make up for this lack of heat while I paitently have been waiting to have my radiator hooked up, I have been heating my room with two 100w incandescent lightbulbs. As silly as it sounds, it has done a great job at taking the edge off in here. 90% of that 100w goes toward generating heat (this is why these lightbulbs are sooo bad). The light fixtures warn to not use anything over 60w but I figured out that if I point my desk lamp up, the amount of air that is drawn from all of the rising heat is enough to effectively cool the lamp. Don't worry everyone, I don't leave these lightbulbs unattended. (yes - I cleaned my desk to take this picture. It usually looks like a paper grenade went off)
By the way - This is what I see when I look up from my chair. Thanks to the continuous exterior insulation, we were able to preserve this beautiful structure and prevent it from being permantly spray foamed over or covered up by interior insulation.
We purchased a sexy new Runtal Radiator with a thermostat, valve fittings, and all the bells and whistles needed to hook it up back in the fall. It is all sitting right here here in my office, leaning up against the wall - ready to go. We have been waiting for the basement slab to be installed before hiring a plumber to come in a hook it up since marching around in the basement in a half foot of slippery mud is a less than ideal work environment.
Needless to say, my room has been a little chilly. Warmth from the rest of the building does not quite migrate its way over to my little office the way that I had hoped it would. When i get to work in the morning, the temp will be in the low 60s which might as well be sub-zero when you are sitting still in a chair all day.
Keep in mind that this room is wrapped in 3" of continuous insulation at the walls and 6" at the roof, just like the rest of the building. I had hoped that maybe the load in this room would be so low that I would be able to survive from the warmth from the rest of the building. Ehh... Almost. As good as the enclosure is in this room, it is still has 3 decent sized R-3 windows. When I use my wizard stick smoke generator and blow a puff of smoke at the window, you can see the smoke get sucked into the convective loop at the surface of the glass and the smoke runs down the surface of the window like a waterfall.
You can see in the table above that the load from the 3 windows in this room is just about equal to the load of the entire roof! This just goes to show that windows are bad bad bad insulators.
_________________________________________________________
To make up for this lack of heat while I paitently have been waiting to have my radiator hooked up, I have been heating my room with two 100w incandescent lightbulbs. As silly as it sounds, it has done a great job at taking the edge off in here. 90% of that 100w goes toward generating heat (this is why these lightbulbs are sooo bad). The light fixtures warn to not use anything over 60w but I figured out that if I point my desk lamp up, the amount of air that is drawn from all of the rising heat is enough to effectively cool the lamp. Don't worry everyone, I don't leave these lightbulbs unattended. (yes - I cleaned my desk to take this picture. It usually looks like a paper grenade went off)
By the way - This is what I see when I look up from my chair. Thanks to the continuous exterior insulation, we were able to preserve this beautiful structure and prevent it from being permantly spray foamed over or covered up by interior insulation.
See the little bookshelf up in the structure?
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