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Comment by omegabravo | Hacker News Reader

Many* places normally don't have the same temperature since people do wear jumpers in winter and less clothes in summer.

Buildings are often (not always) set to 24-25C in summer, and 21-22C in winter.

*no figures sorry, just in my experience

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My wife and I live in Hungary. Every so often we visit Phoenix, AZ in the summer to see family. (My wife is a teacher so it makes sense to go in summer) and the hardest thing for us to do when we go out to eat is finding a restaurant that has seating where we are not freezing cold. It will be 40+ outside and 20 inside.

Yeah, regrettably, the American practice seems to be to overchill in the summer and overheat in the winter. This is also done in the home to the point that people will wear shorts and tshirt indoors in the winter and warmer in the summer (blankets while watching TV for example). Also office buildings suffer from the same problem. Women usually complain the most about it being too cold (men are more likely to wear suits and generate more great I believe).

That is probably partly explained by (at least in older houses without reflective insulation) low radiant heat from outside in the winter, and high radiant heat from outside in summer.

And different humidity explains it some too, even though AC lowers humidity, indoor humidity is still much lower in winter.

I've joked for years that the hotter the place in the US, the colder they keep their AC in the summer.

So many times I see the opposite: of its hot out then people crank the AC to coldest setting and if it's cold out then crank the heat up uncomfortably high. It drives me nuts: I don't have an extra layer with me in the summer and I'm freezing in the store/theater/restaurant. I can only hope that this is an American peculiarity.

Singapore has this issue too. Hotel conference rooms (and some offices, I'm told) will be set to 19⁰C or something equally not achievable so AC works full blast, while outside is humid high 30s.

For large spaces there's more considerations than more person-sized spaces. If you make your theater or restaurant comfortable when it's empty and people are walking in, you'll need much bigger AC gear to catch back up once everyone's in there generating heat. It's one of those cases of a problem being quite a bit harder than you might intuitively think because for the most part, engineers have just solved it for you in most spaces, but there are some places where it just gets too hard to fully solve. Variations between locations are probably accounted for in differences in code and how much money there is to spend on the heating and cooling gear, plus how much variation there is in the outdoor weather.

IIRC a person can be approximated as 100 watts of heating. If you add up everyone in the full restaurant or theater you get quite the number for how much heat the people themeselves are putting out.

At my office the climate control is considered adequate if it is 68 or above in winter, and 78 or cooler in summer.

20 Celsius / 25 Celsius.

I find anything over 22C too much for intelectual work. So, I am glad I WFH

Heh, I find it uncomfortable under 25C.

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