COMFORT CONTROL

The remote control might be the scepter of authority in some households. But with the dark, frigid winter bearing down, some people would argue that the balance of domestic power tilts to the person in command of that little box on the wall next to the bookcase. Who has their hands on your thermostat?

Like cleanliness and competence in the kitchen, temperature preference is one of those barometers of cohabitation. Sure, there are spouses or roommates who live in harmony at a steady 69 degrees, say, no matter how deep the freeze outside. But plenty of others become veterans of the passive-aggressive thermostat battles.

Nicole Conant is settling in for another season of quiet trench warfare with her husband over the ambient air in their century-old Wethersfield, Conn., home.

“The problem is he gets home late from work and turns it up, and I wake up with a pounding headache and have to get out of bed and turn it down,” Conant said. “He puts it up at 80, so the upstairs gets hot while he’s downstairs playing his computer games.”

It’s not the high price of heating oil (averaging more than $2 a gallon in Connecticut) that has her reaching for the thermostat at home. It’s just her body’s preference for a brisk 68 degrees.

It’s just the opposite for Conant’s mother, Valerie Marchesan.

“I like it hot; he likes it cold,” Marchesan said of her husband. “He can never understand why I get dressed to go to bed.”

And when she nudges the gauge up to 70 degrees, she can count on the most common counteroffensive: the thermostat drive-by.

“He’ll just lower it when he walks by,” Marchesan said.

But even as the thermostat seesaws between the spouses in Conant’s house, apparently neither takes offense.

“This is just the way it is. I know how to pick my battles,” she said.

It’s one thing to vie for temperature control at home but quite another to try and get comfortable at work, where as often as not the thermostat is kept under lock and key.

A survey last year by the International Facility Management Association found that “It’s too cold” ranked as No. 1 in the top 10 office complaints. The second most common complaint was, of course, “It’s too hot.”

No matter their order, these temperature beefs have come out at the top of the list for years, way ahead of computer problems and noise grievances, for example.

Alan Hedge, director of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Laboratory at Cornell University, has set out to measure whether there is some substance to these complaints, insofar as the performance of worker bees are affected by the conditions in the hive.

In a study he presented last summer, Hedge linked environmental factors in the office to productivity. Workstations in a Florida insurance office were equipped with sensors that regularly measured temperature and software that monitored the keystrokes employees made on their computers. By linking this data, Hedge could see how typing speed and error rates fluctuated with temperature.

At a relatively warm 77 degrees, Hedge found, workers typed at consistently high rates, with only a 10 percent error rate. But when the office was about 10 degrees cooler, they typed only about half the time, and their error rate rose to 25 percent.

That’s not to say that 77 is the perfect temperature for professionalism. “There is no ideal temperature unless you can standardize things for everybody,” Hedge said.

Nevertheless, he concluded that raising the temperature from 68 degrees to 77 degrees could reduce input errors by 44 percent and save about $2 per worker in lost productivity.

For building managers fielding the “hot/cold calls” that come with the job, keeping workers comfortable and content takes priority over keeping them productive. In fact, they’re probably one and the same.

“If they’re (complaining) all the time, they’re not focusing on their work,” said Keith Sweitzer, an engineer who lays out heating and cooling systems for Progressive Engineering in East Hartford, Conn.

Like all professionals who tinker with temperature, Sweitzer knows too well the psychological quirks that crop up especially during the so-called swing seasons of spring and fall, when buildings might need to be heated in the morning and cooled in the afternoon.

“I think the majority of problems are not the systems in the building but the person in the space (calling in the complaint),” Sweitzer said.

Clothing, air flow, activity level, biology: All these and more factor into why you’re breaking a sweat next to a shivering co-worker. That’s why every call should be investigated, Sweitzer points out.

But, “You can only satisfy 90 percent of the people because it’s impossible to satisfy that other 10 percent. You can put him in a spacesuit, and they’re always going to complain, no matter what you do.”

Building managers know that temperature can take on deeper significance when it becomes an issue in the cubicle culture.

“It’s a very difficult balancing act, and it actually can become a `casus belli’,” said Cynthia Brown, president of the Connecticut chapter of the International Facility Management Association.

The stuffiness or chill in the office, she said, “is something they can point to, it’s something they can explain. And it might be that it is merely a symptom of larger problems with their happiness with their company or their happiness with their work.”

To discourage these discontented souls from asserting control via the thermostat, or to quell interoffice “t-stat battles,” many building managers lock the devices behind plastic. And, in fact, most modern office climate systems are controlled remotely by computer.

But even if its function is only symbolic, a dial on the wall can often get the job done.

“We’ve gone as far as putting in fake thermostats,” said Jeff Leone, president of Air Temp Mechanical Services in West Hartford. Only extreme cases – chronic complainers who perceive problems even when the system is working well – call for such measures, Leone explained, but you can’t argue with results.

As buildings and systems have modernized, such wall-mounted placeboes have become rarer, but the power of suggestion always comes in handy when the problem is more psychological than mechanical.

“We’ve gone in where people say they’re freezing, but nothing is wrong. We just told them the problem is fixed, and they’re 100 percent better, but we never touched a thing,” Leone said.