Posted on

Technology conquers the age-old challenge of thermostat placement

Every good HVAC contractor knows the rules about thermostat placement. Don’t put it on an outside wall, or near air vents, or close to equipment giving off heat, or where people will gather, or near leaky doors and windows, and especially don’t put it where it will be struck by direct sunlight. But what are you supposed to do in a glass-sided office tower? Every area of the outer rooms, especially the corner ones, will be hit by sunlight at some point in the day.

Recently an HVAC contractor identified just such a problem. They’d applied all the industry science in locating the room thermostats, but still the occupants – in this case the company’s top executives – were complaining about erratic temperatures. And to make things worse, the contractor was told to fix the problem without disrupting the offices by putting any new holes in the walls or pulling any new wires.

The solution to this age-old challenge of thermostat placement turned out to be one of the industry’s newer technologies – Wireless. Because wireless thermostat/transmitters can be mounted with removable Velcro type strips, the contractor was able to move the transmitters around over the next week until they located the sweet spot in every room.
Wireless came to the rescue in a similar fashion at a museum in New York. The museum hosts traveling art exhibits that change every three months, many of which require extremely precise temperature and humidity control. One such display was a 2,500-year-old Egyptian mummy.

In order to host the mummy exhibit, museum staff needed to prove that the humidity would stay within very tight boundaries. And not just the humidity of the gallery, but the humidity around the mummy itself because conditions can vary a great deal from one spot to another in large spaces, especially if there are outside walls, skylights and windows. The museum staff met the challenge by installing a wireless system in the traveling exhibits gallery and locating a thermostat/transmitter next the mummy to ensure that conditions there were right. This ability to move transmitters around and give special attention to certain objects has now become a selling point for potential exhibitors at the museum.

by Terry Noble, BAPI Technical Writer

Blogs stories provided by Building Automation Products, Inc.
To gain more insights or learn more about BAPI innovative sensors solutions, contact us at [email protected].