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Your Office Thermostat is Set for Men's Comfort. Here's the Scientific Proof.

posted by cmn32480 on Wednesday August 05 2015, @12:18PM   Printer-friendly

Phoenix666 writes:

Temperatures are set based on formulas that aimed to optimize employees' thermal comfort, a neutral condition of the body when it doesn't have to shiver to produce heat because it's too cold or sweat because it's too hot. It's based on four environmental factors: air temperature, radiant temperature, air velocity and humidity. And two personal factors: clothing and metabolic rate, the amount of energy required by the body to function.

The problem, according to a study in Nature Climate Change on Monday, is that metabolic rates can vary widely across humans based on a number of factors -- size, weight, age, fitness level and the type of work being done -- and today's standards are based on the assumption that every worker is, you guessed it, a man.

Or if you want to be really specific, a 40-year-old, 154-pound man.
...
Kingma and van Marken Lictenbelt's work builds on research out of Japan which found that the neutral temperature for Japanese women was 77.36 degrees (Fahrenheit) while it was 71.78 for European and North American males.

5.58 degrees is a significant difference. Is it better for half the people in the office to be sweaty than half the people in the office to be chilly?

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  • (Score: 2) by isostatic on Wednesday August 05 2015, @01:59PM

    by isostatic (365) on Wednesday August 05 2015, @01:59PM (#218512) Journal

    I suspect that "71.78F" came from a reported "22.1C" originally, given that 22.1C would convert exactly to 71.78F.

    Of course 22.1C would be 22.05-22.15C, which means a range of 71.69-71.87. Reporting "71.8F" would be far more honest. Reporting "22.1C (71.8F)" would be even better.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 05 2015, @06:03PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 05 2015, @06:03PM (#218681)

    If the scientific data really was a nice round number, then the whole thing is suspect. Accurate temp data is rarely convenient whole numbers...even rarer for it to occur twice. Given the time and place this study is from, I suspect Celsius was not the scale used.

  • (Score: 2) by cmn32480 on Thursday August 06 2015, @02:17AM

    by cmn32480 (443) <cmn32480NO@SPAMgmail.com> on Thursday August 06 2015, @02:17AM (#218915) Journal

    I shall try to remember to do the conversions and additions next time. Mea culpa.

    --
    "It's a dog eat dog world, and I'm wearing Milkbone underwear" - Norm Peterson