Does your building have its hands in its' pockets ?

Image via Wikipedia

The North Face of the Eiger gets cold ! 


I was walking along the road in Niederried the other day, looking up towards the Jungfrau range.


I was not as warm as I guess Ueli Steck must have been during his astonishing Record solo climb - in 2 hours 47 minutes - up the North Face of the 13,000-plus-foot Eiger 

So I did the sensible thing and put my hands in my pockets, sensible to me because it meant my hands could not sense the bitter -12C wind that has been blowing in from Siberia.


I had gone for a walk to mull over how best to explain the problems with Building Management Systems or Control Systems in general that arise from poorly commissioned temperature sensors.


I had one of those Eureka moments!  So when Archimedes had his, he was sitting in his bath and jumped out and run down the street, by contrast I had a lot more clothes on, proving that on this occasion I was as wise as a Greek Philosopher.


How do you explain to someone that a weather sensor for building controls should be a long way from the building, over grass and 2 metres off the ground etc Stevenson_screen siting ?


Well - If I walk along with my hands in my pockets I can feel ... How warm my pockets are!  This has very little to do with how much heat my body must generate to stay warm because of the cold air it is "bathed" in. To define the air temperature a building is exposed to you need to try to measure how hot or cold it would be "if the building weren't there".  


This is how you measure the temperature of a swimming pool - you don't stick a thermometer in your bathing suit - because they are way too hot !


The way of telling whether a temperature sensor is reading the right value, is not only to calibrate it in a block but far more important is where you place it, and this requires independent weather data.


We will soon be releasing a service at kwiqly whereby you upload a .csv file of external temperature readings into your browser and we evaluate any problems that you may have using high quality weather data. 


So if interested please let us know using our Contact form  - Thanks for reading!