Excessive heat frustrates students in older dorms

After coming back to her dorm on a typical February afternoon with the temperature outside well below 30 degrees, Kate Huddleston ’11 found that she was not crawling under the blankets and wishing she had a working fireplace. Instead, she was opening windows to cool down her overheated room.

“My roommate and I usually open the windows twice a day for an hour or two to dissipate excess heat,” Huddleston said. “I frequently wear a tank top in my room and sleep without covers.”

Huddleston lives in 1937 Hall, a typical Wilson College dorm with heating systems comparable to those in many older dorms on campus.

But Facilities Engineering Department Director Tom Nyquist explained the tough situation that his department coordinators face in combating room overheating.

“We know there are some overheating problems, but the cost to correct the situation can be fairly expensive unless the building is going to have extensive renovations done on it,” he said.

He added, however, that Building Services plans to “[replace] the old weatherstat and the other steam systems as dorms are renovated.”

Nyquist said these dorms have few thermostats per building, and the heaters use steam instead of hot water. The thermostats work by taking the average temperature of two or three rooms and using these readings to regulate heat for all rooms on that side of the building.

“We get complaints every year from students in these buildings, and the students in these buildings tend to leave their windows open to solve their overheating problem,” Nyquist said.

Nyquist explained, however, that overheating is often caused and not helped by students opening their windows.

“Problems occur when the resident of a space with a thermostat opens the window on a cool day,” Nyquist said. “The sensor detects the cold room and kicks the heat on for the whole side of the building.”

Though many students live in rooms with this type of heating system, there are a wide variety of temperature-control facilities in campus dorms. Many of the newer or recently renovated buildings have thermostats that allow students to set the temperature in their rooms.

“I think that having an adjustable thermostat in every room is really a godsend,” Raymond Hsu ’11 said. Hsu lives in a quad in Blair Hall, where each room has its own thermostat. “The people who sleep in the other bedroom like it a little cooler, so with these thermostats, we can all be happy.”

Most rooms, however, are not as well-equipped, so students are forced to choose between suffering through the heat and opening windows to cool their room, albeit inefficiently.

Aside from the discomfort to students from living in sweltering heat, the inefficiencies of such a heating system have environmental effects. Greening Princeton president Kathryn Andersen ’08 agreed that overheated rooms have a negative impact on the environment and that this should be on students’ minds as they make eco-friendly decisions.

“If we can make conscious decisions such as buying a locally produced, organically grown apple, we can also think about other small changes that reduce our carbon footprint,” Andersen said. “This type of lifestyle change includes things like lowering thermostats.”

Rather than going through the trouble of installing individual thermostats in rooms, Andersen recommends that the temperature settings in all rooms be adjusted. “I would be thrilled to see a widespread acceptance by the student population of lower default temperature settings for all University thermostats in dorm rooms,” she said.