Three Day Desk Temp Study

The office at my current gig runs a little warm. This is not me complaining. I like wearing short sleeves in the dead of winter and it can always be worse. I would much rather the office run hot than cold. Cold is terrible and miserable. I brought my trusty Acurite Digital Thermometer to work a while back during my Fridge Cooling Zones project, so I thought why not track the temperature at my desk for a few days.

Temperature Collection Technique

A while back I had created a PowerShell Script Reminder System. You set the number of minutes you want to delay the timer and run the script. After the amount of time you entered elapsed, a pop up box would display in the center of your screen. Low tech I know but it seemed to work well.

Here is an example of a 15 minute timer.

param([string]$time = "00:15:00")
$timeReformat = $time -replace ",","."
$seconds = ([TimeSpan]::Parse($timeReformat)).TotalSeconds
$seconds

Start-Sleep -s $seconds
Add-Type -AssemblyName System.Windows.Forms

$Form = New-Object system.Windows.Forms.Form
$Form.Text = "FINAL COUNTDOWN"
$Font = New-Object System.Drawing.Font("Calibri",24)
$Form.Font = $Font
$Label = New-Object System.Windows.Forms.Label
$Label.Text = "REMINDER REMINDER REMINDER"
$Label.AutoSize = $True
$Form.Width = 400
$Form.Height = 200
$Form.MinimizeBox = $False
$Form.AutoSize = $True
$Form.MaximizeBox = $False
$Form.StartPosition = "CenterScreen"
$Form.Controls.Add($Label)
$Form.BackColor = "White"
$Form.ForeColor = "Blue"
$Form.TopMost = "True"
$Form.ShowDialog()

Here is the pop up message.

As I  mentioned pretty low tech. A few problems with this.

1. I have to manually run the timer over and over again
2. I hardcoded the time instead of passing that into the script.
3. Sometimes I would forget to restart the timer after 15 minutes

I may tweak that script later.

So anyway, I would run the powershell script and then start working on something else. After 15 minutes I would get that fancy pop up box. I would then hop into a Notepad++ document where I would record the date/time (using a shortcut mapped to Crtl+F5), the temperature, and the humidity. 

I would then fire up the PowerShell Script for another 15 minute interval. Again several problems with this low-tech solution. The main problem is that I would forget to restart the PowerShell Script after recording the time.

Day 1 

Date: 2/3/2015
KC High Temp: 46
Recorded Office High: 79
Humidity: 16%

Raw data

Date	Temp
2/3/2015 7:34	75
2/3/2015 7:53	75
2/3/2015 8:11	77
2/3/2015 8:26	77
2/3/2015 8:42	77
2/3/2015 8:57	77
2/3/2015 9:13	77
2/3/2015 9:28	79
2/3/2015 9:44	77
2/3/2015 10:07	79
2/3/2015 10:22	79
2/3/2015 10:38	79
2/3/2015 10:53	79
2/3/2015 11:08	79
2/3/2015 11:48	77
2/3/2015 12:21	75
2/3/2015 13:01	75
2/3/2015 13:17	75
2/3/2015 13:32	77
2/3/2015 13:52	77
2/3/2015 14:07	77
2/3/2015 14:22	77
2/3/2015 14:38	77
2/3/2015 14:54	77
2/3/2015 15:09	77
2/3/2015 15:25	77
2/3/2015 15:40	77

Chart:

There was a huge dive near lunch. You could actually feel a cool breeze running through the office area. It was as if someone enabled some kind of AC cooling unit to cool the place down. Humidity remained constant at  16% for all recorded observations. Thus every time I go to grab my coat I get shocked.

Day 2

Date: 2/5/2015
KC High Temp: 28
Recorded Office High: 79
Humidity: 16%

Raw Data

Date	Temp
2/5/2015 7:33	73
2/5/2015 7:50	73
2/5/2015 8:06	73
2/5/2015 8:21	75
2/5/2015 8:36	75
2/5/2015 8:52	75
2/5/2015 9:08	75
2/5/2015 9:23	77
2/5/2015 9:39	77
2/5/2015 9:52	77
2/5/2015 10:07	77
2/5/2015 10:24	77
2/5/2015 10:44	77
2/5/2015 10:59	77
2/5/2015 11:24	77
2/5/2015 11:40	77
2/5/2015 12:12	77
2/5/2015 12:27	77
2/5/2015 12:44	77
2/5/2015 13:07	77
2/5/2015 13:21	77
2/5/2015 13:23	77
2/5/2015 13:38	77
2/5/2015 14:01	77
2/5/2015 14:19	77
2/5/2015 14:34	77
2/5/2015 14:53	79
2/5/2015 15:08	79
2/5/2015 15:24	79
2/5/2015 15:34	79
2/5/2015 15:56	79

Chart

I was a little more with it on this day in the temp collection. I collected more samples than day 1.  Day 2 was a more typical trend in temperatures in the office. A gradual incline is the norm and is shown here in day 2.

Day 3

Date: 2/6/2015
KC High Temp: 54
Recorded Office High: 79
Humidity: 16%

Raw 

Date	Temp
2/6/2015 6:52	73
2/6/2015 7:05	75
2/6/2015 7:21	75
2/6/2015 7:36	75
2/6/2015 7:59	77
2/6/2015 8:17	77
2/6/2015 8:33	77
2/6/2015 8:47	77
2/6/2015 9:14	77
2/6/2015 9:37	77
2/6/2015 9:57	79
2/6/2015 10:01	79
2/6/2015 10:17	79
2/6/2015 12:01	77
2/6/2015 12:16	77
2/6/2015 12:31	77
2/6/2015 12:47	77
2/6/2015 13:03	77
2/6/2015 13:28	77
2/6/2015 13:54	77
2/6/2015 14:11	77
2/6/2015 14:37	77
2/6/2015 14:53	77
2/6/2015 15:11	77
2/6/2015 15:26	77
2/6/2015 15:38	77
2/6/2015 15:53	79

Chart

Interesting dip in temperature on day 3. We reached the high temp right before 10:00AM then had a dip around noon. Stayed consistent throughout the day and we had a last minute spike to 79 right before I left the office for the day.

Findings

• It is warm in the office
• We reach the high temperature early and typically stay there
• Sometimes we have a random cooling event that will drop the temperature down. Hard to determine the pattern at this point with the small sample size.
• The office is pretty dry. 16% humidity was the constant throughout the test. I did see the humidity as high as 20% from time to time.

Next steps

I am planning to build a Arduino temperature recorder to do some longer term automatic trending of temperature. I will base it on a temperature collector I built a while ago. Of course I will post the details on the blog should I actually follow through with the plan.