Waking up from a peaceful slumber yesterday morning, I switched on the light and opened a window to let out the irritating pool of hot air circulating like an uninvited guest. If my dorm was a gingerbread house, it would have melted in two minutes.
Now, how could my dorm room possibly be so hot on a mid-October morning that was 50 degrees outside? Well, the reason it seems is that Rensselaer apparently has a policy for temperature control that only uses two states:
a) The heat is on so high that students are cooked like a shishkabob, or
b) The heat is turned off, and students freeze like glaciers floating in the Arctic.
Choosing between either alternative is not a comforting thought. For the former choice, it is much more difficult to concentrate on studying when you’re being fried to a crisp. Thus, students must open their windows in the middle of the winter to let hot air out. Constantly opening and closing windows to regulate temperature can quickly become very annoying to all those involved. Additionally, expending the extra heat that way is environmentally unconscientious because it wastes a large amount of energy.
For the former choice, the brain’s mental processes often do not behave correctly when shivers run through your body every 30 seconds. Students could put on three more layers of clothing, but that would require an inordinate number of laundry loads to clean all those extra layers.
Students who live in the Quad, Barton Hall, and Sharp Hall—the three dorms on campus that actually have rooms equipped with thermostats—face similar problems. Because their thermostats often do not correctly shut off the heat at the temperature specified, residents of those dorms must turn off the heat completely when the room becomes like an oven.
For heating needs on campus, the student is always the one who loses out. It is time for RPI to install working controllable thermostats in every dorm on campus. That would not only reduce heating costs by conserving energy, but also make a number of cranky students much happier.
