Sunday, May 20, 2012

Happiness Is A Warm Arse!

The Southern Hemisphere winter's surely here.
Daytime temperatures are heading south fast!
Everyone has a slightly different internal thermostat. Me, I'm really feeling the cold at the moment, so I prefer the room temperature to be considerably higher than glacial. The problem with working in an office is that everyone wants the temperature set differently, and there'll be harsh words when someone plays with the office thermostat.
Now - following years of heated car seats - OhGizmo! reports there's an office solution: heated and cooled office chairs.
In any given office, almost half of the workers are dissatisfied with the temperature, according to Phil Williams of Webcor Builders in USA: "Our Tempronics chairs allow workers to have individual control of thermal comfort, which is known to increase productivity and employee retention. The portable chair can move with the user, in contrast with the fixed nature of customary AC systems."
The Tempronic chair features a cooling/heating system that allows each individual user to set his preferred working temperature. In tests, the chair kept workers comfortable between 16C-29C. It uses around 75W of power to do its thing, and it could be seen as a way to save on business energy costs (as a typical AC can consume 1,800W). Not sure how the numbers crunch here, coz it would just take 24 of these chairs to use up 1,800W. Then again, maybe an 1,800W AC isn’t enough to cover the area taken up by 24 workers. Anyway, the chairs cost between US$800-1,100 depending on quality.
The other thing I'm not clear on: do these run on batteries that you'd charge up overnight, or do they plug in to the socket?

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