Re: Heat in the Dorms

This is in response to Adam's post about the dorms being excessively hot (http://abuzzweekly.blogspot.com/). I have also found time and time again that at night I'm overheated. My solution to this is to not only open my window but to turn on a fan, that's eight hours of electricity and gas being wasted and like Adam said this is not exactly congruent with the things that Ithaca stands for. First semester I was in the Freshman sustainability seminar. We had people come and speak to us most Friday's about various things and one of those times the speaker spoke about this topic. She said that Ithaca decides on set temperatures, basically, in order to maximize monetary savings. She also asked that we not open our windows if we feel the temperature is set too high because that's wasting energy. In this instance the reality is that the same amount of energy is being used whether or not the window is open because they have a fixed thermostat. So rather than wasting energy from heating and cooling at the same time the school should make some sort of system where the people who are actually living in the dorms experiencing the heat have some say in the temperature.