Dec 30, 2008 0
The Leak…
Since one person seems to want to know what happened with the leak in my office, and, well, I need a post, here we go.
The short answer is that the leak was stopped. Stopped, not fixed. Turns out that my office’s radiator has two tubes/coils in it. One is hooked up to the steam supply, the other to chilled water. After three, four hours of experimentation and work by the HVAC folks, it was determined that my chilled water coil has a leak in it.
So, what to do? Well, in the long term, I need a whole new radiator. They take about a month to build/order/something so it’s gonna be a while. But, we can’t have leaks in the meantime, so they turned off the chilled water to my unit. Doesn’t sound so bad does it, especially in the winter. You’d think that, right?
You’d be wrong. As I’ve discovered, my radiator has, essentially, two settings. Hot on or cold on. The thermostat then applies each in varying amounts to manage temperature. But, without chilled water to temper the steam, all you get is heat. So, I can either turn off the heat by slamming the thermostat to 60 degF or whatever "all the way to the left" is, or I can turn on the heat. When I do that, it can reach over 90 degF in my office if I forget to open my door.
Like it did yesterday when it got up to 91 degrees.
It was hot.
