I’m living in a high rise building with central air, and they switch the entire system from heating in winter to cooling in summer. We have a thermostat, but I’m not sure it does anything. It’s usually too hot or cold, all I can do is turn off the unit or play around with the fan speed.
Do you think there’s a shaft the sends hot or cold air depending on the season up my entire building and my unit turns on a fan to pull in some of that air if needed? Why is my unit always too cold or too hot and adjusting the thermostat doesn’t don much?
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I’m uniquely qualified to answer this question:
There are a few systems in place here. Either you are in a building with a 4-pipe system, where they are pumping chilled and heated water to your individual air handler, or a 2-pipe system, where it switches over from heating to cooling. If it’s 4-pipe, you shouldn’t have problems with your thermostat.
That said, it could also be VRF (variable refrigerant flow). If you are in a relatively new construction build, you may have a VRF system. This one is incredibly efficient, but loses efficacy at extreme temperatures.
The third option is if you have radiators near your windows. This is a very old style system. Very, very good at preventing drafts, but with not so good local controls.
Do you have access to the room in your house that has the furnace?
Central hvac has one big heater, one big a/c and one big fan. You can control your vent but the vent is usually always blowing. They cannot have both heat and a/c at the same time so they have to switch between the two.
For this reason these systems are not common in multi family buildings. It can be convenient for single family homes or things like warehouses where there aren’t a lot of rooms.
The best thing you can do is by a portable a/c and heater to keep yourself comfortable.
It may depend on the specific building but when I lived in a high rise the system was water based. There was a boiler and a chiller in the basement that warmed or cooled water sent through pressurized pipes running through the HVAC units in each unit. The units then had fans that allowed us to control air speed blowing across the insides that had the hot or cold water running through.
The building is most likely pumping hot or cold water, depending on the season, to a small radiator on your unit’s HVAC system. A fan then blows air through the radiator and then throughout your unit. The thermostat controls a valve that turns the water to the radiator on or off, depending upon the temperature you’ve set.
The location of the thermostat can affect the whole system. I lived in a unit that had the thermostat located directly by the HVAC setup, which happened in the solarium, the room that received the most sunlight during the day. In the summer, the room would warm up and keep the thermostat forcing cold air throughout the rest of the unit, making every other room too cool. In the winter it would often make the thermostat think the temperature was warm enough, and shut off the heat, leaving the rest of the unit cold. Really bad design.
Another issue with the pipe systems is that on extreme weather days, the water temperature diminishes with everyone requiring constant heating or cooling.
It really depends though on how the system is engineered. Every building will have differences.
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