Students residing in North Campus dorms have had to deal with extreme temperatures, both high and low. Credit: Jessica Griffin (via TNS) [Original caption: North ColAdjusting your thermostat is a way to save on your electric bills. Air conditioner HVAC AC thermostat.]
The newest dorms, located in the North Residential District and completed in 2016, use a heating, ventilation and air conditioning system, Dave Isaacs, Student Life communications and media relations manager, said. These buildings use fan coil and passive valance systems, which allow the buildings to use minimal energy to heat or cool the dorms.
Some students, including Natalia Cymbal, a second-year in mechanical engineering living in Bowen House, have grown used to their room temperatures being around 77 degrees every day and sometimes reaching as high as 84 degrees.
“It’s uncomfortable that it’s constantly 70-some degrees in this room,” Cymbal said. “I think part of the reason everyone is frustrated is because we don’t understand it.”
The system either moves warm room air over evaporator coils, absorbing the air’s heat to cool and eject the heat out of the building, or cold room air through heating coils that transfer the absorbed heat from the heat pumps or boilers into the building, Isaacs said. Older dorms on North Campus, such as Taylor Tower, which was built in 1966, were renovated and have slightly different systems due to their design differences.
All thermostats are programmed to regulate the temperatures within the buildings, limiting a student’s ability to adjust the thermostat outside of 69 and 75 degrees in warm weather and 65 and 71 degrees in cold weather, Isaacs said. That temperature limitation varies throughout the older dorms on North Campus based on equipment technologies.
Isaacs said the set limits of thermostats are based on comfort zones, energy efficiency and conservation efforts and industry standards.
If a student is experiencing room temperatures outside of the thermostat’s range limits, then they should make a service request through Service2Facilities to have it looked at by a maintenance worker, Isaacs said.
“That’s the easiest first step and honestly, in looking through the system, we have not gotten complaints,” Isaacs said.
Students say otherwise.
Cymbal said she and her roommates were submitting a service request once every two weeks at the beginning of the academic year, reaching a total of five separate requests, some of which were said to be completed despite a maintenance worker never coming to the dorm.
Madison Zimmerly, a second-year in biochemistry living in Taylor Tower, said she has put in three service requests this academic year for abnormal room temperatures and has also experienced her requests being marked as complete, even though a worker never came to the dorm.
“We’ve had some pretty nasty service request response times,” Zimmerly said. “I get annoyed when they just dismiss it rather than coming to at least check that we are not lying to them, that we have a problem or that we would like to get something checked.”
Zimmerly’s room temperatures, however, are the opposite of Cymbal’s, reaching as low as 54 degrees during a night when it was 7 degrees outside.
Residential housing options vary in cost and amenities, with some dorms operating with no air conditioning, but at a lower cost for students. Though Zimmerly is in a dorm with air conditioning, she said she’s frustrated that an amenity she is paying for isn’t working properly.
“Compared to no air conditioning, [Taylor Tower] is an upgrade, but the extreme [temperatures] are pretty inconvenient and I would like to see Ohio State get them fixed,” Zimmerly said.
Both Cymbal and Zimmerly said their frustrations would have been lessened if the heating and air conditioning system had been explained to them before moving in.
“I feel if there was something simply like an email or little instructions next to the thermostat control so there was something I could read to really understand what’s going on before I had to call them several times, then I would be a lot happier,” Cymbal said.
Isaacs said the university is currently working on adding such instructions next to every thermostat in the North Campus residential dorms by fall to explain the heating and air conditioning system and help students better understand it.
