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Jury Riggers Unite!
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This will not, how you say, work.
I just love low tech solutions. At my wife’s workplace, they have all kinds of cardboard contraptions to regulate and direct AC flow. This one wins with the low-med-high penned on the bottom.
This has balloon effect written all over it. If you cover this vent, the airflow from another one is going to spike. Wonder who the unlucky devil is who gets blasted by A/C every time the office gets cold.
P.S. Love the tape-marks above the vent. Looks like this isn’t the first solution they tried.
We had to block a duct at an old job. It redirected the freezing air from the lowly clerks to the well-paid engineers. The business soon paid a heating and air place to come in and do a massive revamp.
“See kids! this is how you recycle ‘Junk Mail’ and/or your ‘Mother in laws Christmas Cards’…..that is if you get any cards from her at all.”
This is pretty easy to understand; I’ve seen some seriously messed up HVAC systems. One summer day as a lad I sat, dressed for warm weather, in a room at 65F, programming a computer. Got kinda cold. I found out they had to do that, because it was set up so if you set it above 65F it would cool it to 65F and then TURN ON THE HEAT to get to your setpoint.
This is tagged as a Rube Goldbergian Solution, but it’s not really Rube Goldbergian at all. It’s far too simple to have his name attached to it.
Perfect, I say. Perfect!
This is freaking genius! I love it. And I don’t care if it works or not, as #1 says, it’s the work of a genius.
I work with the tools in the HVAC trade and I am wondering why so many of these items on this web site have to do with air conditioning. As for this particular example, I’ve seen worse. How about a VAV box controlled manually with a coat hanger poking through a hole in a ceiling tile because the customer woudldn’t pay for a new actuator?
Wouldn’t it be easier to just use the fins and redirect the airflow, say, to the ceiling?
Had the same problem here in my office where staff near the aircond units complained of being to cold and switches off the unit.
Turns out the fins were directed towards them. A small 1 minute worth of adjustments to the fins was all it takes to stop everybody else from sweating
I bet that it now goes “EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!” every time you switch to “Medium”.
This may mean one, or more, of three things: the person responsible for the kludge was unable to access the thermostat, doesn’t know how to work the thermostat, or the thermostat doesn’t work.
We did this for one of my old workplaces because it was freezing in one office, and boiling in another. And it 100% worked! This was after having the repair guys out twice a month for 6 months trying all sorts of things to fix the problem.
@D.
Or all of the above. I’ve worked HVAC Service before (Electrician-ing now) and both Building Owners and Renters can be totally cheap.
They won’t pay to fix the problem by moving the t-stat, balancing the system or adding registers where they need more and permanent dampers behind the ducts they need less. They just apply band-aids like this.
Could be worse – crank the t-stat down to 50F on a humid day and ice up the evaporator to where it’s a solid block…
Somehow, I don’t think that piece of paper will hold in place when you set it on High.
@Urbanspaceman Right. Anything refrigeration and/or auto will get the votes in no time and make it here. I personally vote auto every time but I confess I enjoy HVAC comments the most.
I CAN’T Believe someone CAN’T SIMPLY FIGURE OUT how to ADJUST the freakin DAMPER VANES!
Sorry, just venting.
Nice picture… I’d say they macgyvered it real good!
OMG. I just saw the “Low – Med – High” signs. OMG.
Took me a while to get this one. Maybe it’s because there’s something written on the paper. Overall, I declare it a fail.
Farei isso na minha sala, no meu escritório…..
This must be a government building, I have something very similar (only using wide clear packing tape) in the lobby of my office. The county judge was proud of us for saving tax dollars. Gotta love those politicians! Odd but he recently voted himself a raise….
I have worked at places where the thermostat is locked away and only accessible by building maintenance people, or the thermostat is a dummy one (lots of buildings have dummy ones these days) and the one that actually controls the HVAC system is centrally located in the basement.
So, controlling the vent with this method is probably the only method the people have in that area.
@All The HVAC guys
This is a lot cheaper than having a system balanced, or installing dampers, or anything else.
We just taped manila folders over our vents and then it blasted into our bosses office who was to short to tape over the vent and not smart enough to figure out if she standed on a chair she could do it. She bought a cardigan and everyone is happy now.
Michael: My wife used to work in a UPS office where they were tenants and the thermostat was under a locked box. Only the landlord had the key. It was into November and they were freezing. I lent her a thermostat key, she went in early and switched the stat to “heat”. Once the burning dirt smell dissipated it was comfortable. That very night the landlord came by and set the stat to “off” again. I despise those kind of people.
wideapertur, BioRocks, chikaru, and particularly Jason Salmon: your comments remind me of jwz’s tale of a similar thing happening at a company he worked at:
http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/butterfly.html
That looks like my office. Landlord has the A/C set to never turn off near the windows. My corner office has three vents for the windows and one normal a/c vent. The window vents don’t have a damper or fins to adjust, so my only alternative is stuffing paper in them. Now I don’t freeze and the server room is cooler.
And good luck trying to get the landlord to fix the issues.
@Bruce
My wife used to do that at the old place all the time. It’d be a hot and steamy, super humid day. She’d dial the thermostat all the way down. I’d get home and she’d complain that the AC wasn’t working. I’d go down and lift off the panel, and it looked like Frosty the Smowman died a horrible death in there.
@Pat
The box says “Iron Mountain.” It’s a confidential records management company.
lol @wideaperture
That looks like a lot of HVAC solutions I saw when I was in serving in OIF/OEF. I should have taken pics of the more dangerous electrical jery-rigs
I’m betting this guy lives in Boston or thereabouts.
I had this problem myself.
My roommate insisted on having the apartment at about 45 degrees all the time and there was only one thermostat for both bedrooms, so to keep from getting sick I had to cover part of the vent depending on how much freezing air flow I wanted.
Believe it or not it will
I was gonna thumbs up but it was already at exactly 666 and I didn’t want to screw it up…
…another fine use of Iron Mountain’s cheesy box.
Does anyone actually know what the paper says? Also, at my house we had a problem one night, but it wasn’t due to a broken or unreachable thermostat. It was due to a broken window. In our downstairs bathroom, we have a window that swings open. the thing that attaches to the bottom to make it come back was loose. It was the middle of the half-winter half-spring part of the year. Two people were having a conversation. One was outside at the side of the house only viewable through the three bathrooms. The other was inside. You do the math.