I don’t know about your home and office, but every office I worked in had atrocious heating and cooling. People wear hoodies inside all summer because the AC is set too low.
Yup. You need a work hoodie for summer.
And there’s always that one girl that has a blanket.
Or the lady who keeps bringing in a space heater and plugging it into their computer power strip despite being told repeatedly not to do that
It’s me. I’m the lady with the space heater (and the blanket, and the hoodie). I have garbage circulation, so I have to warm up my frozen fingers and toes a few times a day or I can’t get anything done. If there were any other outlets, I’d use those, but there aren’t because my building is old as balls.
definitely a perk working from home, you decide temperature/sound/etc.
But I’m talking from an overall society energy use perspective.
I’m curious if the energy efficiency of having people in one building compares to the energy efficiency of them spread out.
It will greatly vary, as some are already in apartment buildings sharing that efficiency, some are in better eff rated homes, some are in worse eff rated homes.
Not sure this study can accurately claim 54% … even if they said ±10%, it’s still probably way out to lunch.
Don’t forget about all the useless TVs and monitors running in offices all the time.
And heating/cooling/lighting all the empty rooms.
Plus staff for cleaning and security.
You’re not wrong that it’d be interesting to see some data, but my intuition is offices are extremely wasteful in a lot of ways. I could be wrong though!
I remember reading about a study pre-pandemic that found remote work was greatly better from an emissions standpoint than in-office work and it mostly came down to the massive amounts of resources spent commuting, and if I remember correctly it even found the emissions cost of commuting by public transit to be significant enough to see improvement by remote work
