I'm not convinced it is a net positive in the end. Especially for big companies, heating an office space with 500+ people is probably much more efficient than heating 500 individual houses for example
Most houses stay heated during the day anyway, remote work or not, it doesn't change the situation that much. And offices will remain heated whether there are full or only half of the employees actually in the building.
Do you turn off the heating in every room in your house when you go out to work?
Even if you did have some "smart" appliance that would make it easier, you'd have to "over-heat" when you come back to get again the desired temperature (or pre-heat a few hours before coming back), which would mostly make the effort's result insignificant...
It would make sense to drop heating when leaving for a few days though, week-ends/holidays. Offices are not heated on week-ends for example.
I will note that I am in a warm country, so we much more rarely have the heat on. But if I'm out of the house for 8 hours, I'll definitely turn off the AC. It might take time to get the house cold again, but c'mon, no way we'd pay for a day's worth of electricity for no reason.
I wonder how much this changes if it's heating vs cooling, and based on how much you have to heat/cool a place.
>heating an office space with 500+ people is much more efficient than heating 500 individual houses
Citation needed.
I would argue its very hard to make any general statement about this.
In my case the office is much more wasteful than the space I use for remote work for a multitude of reasons.
I said I'm not convinced, it obviously isn't a general thing.
A friend of mine spends 500+ euros per month on gas for heating since he works from home, no way on earth his office uses 500 per person and per month on heat
A 2kW electric heater can heat up any reasonable size office room up to a temperature where you are going to have to strip to your underwear (or turn it off) in under an hour in my experience.
Even if it's on 8 hours a day constantly, 5 days a week, 4 weeks a month that's 320kWh or just over £100 a month at UK energy prices.
In comparison, we have a 1600 sq ft home and only have $50 USD gas bills lately. It's definitely been higher (at least double), but we've been learning to live with a colder thermostat.
Granted this is the US, and natural gas is considerably cheaper here than in a lot of countries in Europe right now, so you probably need to at least double what I said anyway for Europe.
Is that € 500 for just the working hours? Because homes are also generally heated for other uses than work. Those reasons don't go away if you work at the office. If you've got a spouse working from home, or kids coming from school, that house is going to be heated anyway.
The norms are different in different locations. Where I live (Sweden), I'd say pretty much everybody sets a comfortable temperature and keeps it at that.
OTOH, our houses are generally heavily insulated, so while heating a house is expensive, keeping it heated is relatively cheap. I'm always amazed at the lack of insulation when I travel abroad. I never freeze as much as when I leave Scandinavia (no joke).
For those of us who live in a place that reaches freezing temperatures for months on end, there's no choice. If I don't heat my house, my pipes will freeze and I'll be out thousands of dollars in repair work and damage.
I turn the heat down to 55 or so (the lowest the thermostat will go) when I'm away for a few days. But I've never heard of anyone not leaving their heat on some setting for this reason. Do you live somewhere that almost never drops below freezing?
> Do you live somewhere that almost never drops below freezing?
Grew up in a place that reaches -25c pretty often and never heard of that. It's in europe though so we probably have better insulation. I could leave my house 3 days and no pipe would burst, I've never heard of anyone having burst pipes now that I think about it. When I went to school and my parents were at work we'd shut down the heating completely, we were pretty poor so there is that, but I don't remember being cold
When I was in california we'd have to run heating full blast 24/7 to maintain 16c indoor so that my explain a few things
Woah, that's wild! I've lived in mostly wooden houses in the Northeast for most of my life, and it seems to happen to one or two people in every community per year.
It's mostly a problem where I come from during power outages -- if you don't have power for 2-3 days, you might not be able to run even a propane-based heating system. But maybe the prevalance of water baseboard heating systems contributes; I imagine they're the most vulnerable pipes in the house to freezing, since they by nature sit closest to cold exterior temperatures.
One more thing I assumed was a worldwide problem, that it turns out is just a result of shoddy American building quality. Sigh.
We lower the heat if nobody is home. But, that's the difference between 70* and 65*. With no heat, the house would eventually be 32* in the dead or winter.
And we only do that because smart thermostats exist and use our phones as presence sensors. Without that, we'd have to manually lower the heat and I doubt we'd bother/remember.
I certainly wouldn't heat your home when nobody is home, but most people do return home after a day at the office, and many people don't live alone. That's what I'm referring to.
Or do you demand that they live in the cold while you're at the office?
> The most common way of heating here is that you have radiators set up
Most people here would need to actively tweak it every time the leave the house and every time they come in. And do it separately for each room. Just from the way how heating works - you have valve in each room that you turn in order to adjust heating.
I do. I turn up the heat in the morning and turn it down again in the evening. Smart thermostats can do that automatically, but my home office doesn't have a smart thermostat.
I work from home full time, my gas bill is a fraction of that (~GBP100/month), and that's even accounting for the crazy energy cost increases we've seen in the UK.
Anecdotally I see many people traveling more enabled by remote work (and a single flight can equal a full year of car commuting). And I feel many people use telework days to run errands or go to lunch more frequently often nearly matching commute miles in a day.
When else are you supposed to run errands? Here's my anecdotal driving activity after taking a remote position:
I used to drive every day of the week. Now, it's 3 days, on average. If I could walk or cycle to the gym (roads are 0% accessible for pedestrians), I could easily drop that to one or two days.
In terms of running errands, I've moved that to a "before work" activity. It's honestly amazing how smooth it all goes at 8:00am vs 5:30pm. Plus, I consider this a net positive for the community since I'm one less person clogging up the grocery store at their busiest time.
Yeah, but many offices are likely to be converted to other uses, rather than persist with partial occupation. Hotel, residential etc
People often say it’s cost prohibitive, but it’s been done many times before, and valuations of Offices will get so depressed that conversions begin to look very lucrative
Large office buildings do not convert into hotels or residential all that well. Most of them have all of their plumbing and utilities in the central core. That's not easy to retrofit.
They may also not be up to code for residential use.
And plumbing and wiring a building is vastly cheaper than building a new one from scratch.
Most modern office buildings are already designed so their tenants can orient the space however they like, Including adding/removing walls and plumbing/electric
If you can buy office buildings at half the valuation of a similar square footage residential building, converting it will obviously be profitable. It was already profitable in many cases pre Covid before office became severely depressed. The valuation gap between residential and office has probably never been wider
Also if you have pets you can't really turn off the heat (or AC in the summer for desert areas), and children usually get home in the afternoon while people are still working.
Pets. Other family members. Plus the fact that you're "daytime" heating/cooling a home from 6:30-8:30 am and 3:30-10 pm anyway, and that modern or updated homes keep their temperature for several hours. So the debate is really over a few degrees for a couple of extra hours (Vs. heating an entire other building that may not otherwise exist).
I know at our workplace heating on Monday mornings has to start several hours earlier than on Tuesday because the office lost almost all of its built-up heat from the previous Friday. I also know that they continue to run the heating on holiday-Fridays/Mondays because if they don't by the following Monday/Tuesday, the temperature will drop too low and could damage equipment.
Well, you may live with other people who are in it when you're not, causing it to be heated anyway.
But I guess the answer would be that people can't abide the thought of one uncomfortable minute in their own home, and don't bother figuring out how to program the thermostat.
Typical American house uses a heat pump (basically an AC run "backwards") with a single thermostat (bigger houses might have multiple complete systems).
If you turned the heat off at 7am as you left for work, the house would probably be below 60 when you got home, and take most of the evening to reheat, only to be turned back down again at bed time. I don't know anybody who manually does any of this - at best, they have a smart thermostat that lets them schedule home/away time or uses cell phones as presence sensors. And even then, they'll lower the heat 5-8 degrees, not turn it off completely.
That might be typical for new builds, but it varies a lot by region. Much of the northern half of the country is still burning propane, pellets/wood, or fuel oil for heat.
Yes it follows from first principles, a well-insulated house has a structure that is being heated and retains heat (like a pizza stone) as well as the air itself. Heating air inside a cold structure is quite different from heating air inside a warm structure. So your evening heating will have to work harder to warm the structure back up that was allowed to cool in the day. The air in the evening will cool faster and the heating will have to kick back on again, dumping heat into the structure.
If you leave the heat on during the day (and that can be a few degrees lower) then you can keep the structure warm and avoid all that evening heat loss and cycling. But only if you have good insulation. Otherwise you’re just dumping heat out into the environment. The other factor is how cold it is outside, if the temperature gradient is steep then it’s harder to contain hot air.
You can think about this at the limits. You could turn off the system for days, weeks, months, or whole seasons and allow the house to drift with the ambient environment. Then, you turn it on and recover to the conditioned mode. This certainly uses less energy than if you maintained it for that whole duration. This is because the loss to environment tapers off. It does not keep losing and reach some absurd extreme beyond that of the environment. Reducing the interval for the drift does not fundamentally change this equation. At the other extreme, you can do what a normal thermostat does now. The system is turned off for minutes and allowed to drift until it is called back into action. All other time intervals in between exist on a continuum. The maximal losses are when you try to keep the constant comfort level.
As far as thermodynamics, you're always exchanging heat with the environment. Only the coefficients change with different insulation levels. And these losses correlate with the gradient between the inside and outside. When the gradient is zero, equilibrium means zero net heat transfer. When the house is allowed to drift towards the outside temperature, the total losses will be lower than if comfort were maintained through those same hours. The integral (sum) of these loss rates over time is your total energy loss and a good proxy for the total energy needed from the heating system to condition the space.
The whole tradeoff is about comfort and convenience to have the space conditioned when you want it and to have an appropriately sized system for the needed load. Whether oversized or undersized, equipment may not operate efficiently if asked to operate outside its designed load level and duty cycle. It can also become unreliable with the wrong duty cycle, i.e. a small unit asked to run too long and too frequently or a large unit asked to run too infrequently and for too short a duration each time.
That the equipment has to operate at a higher load during recovery does not imply that it actually uses more total energy in the daily cycle. That would only be true if the equipment is inefficient at the recovery load. An example where this is true would be a heatpump system with an auxiliary resistive heating element that engages in recovery. But, a gas furnace or a sufficiently large heatpump is likely more efficient in recovery since it is also working with a larger gradient until recovery is complete.
It is common for basic clock-based, programmable or smart thermostats to allow for daily drift to save energy. They use a more comfortable set point during morning and evening hours when occupants are most sensitive and then allow some drift towards ambient during midday and nighttime hours when occupants are less likely to notice. This is precisely to leverage this tradeoff to have less total energy losses per day. They don't completely turn off but vary the set point so that the building is kept within a range where the comfortable and efficient recovery is possible. Depending on the day, this might be equivalent to turning off or it might just reduce the duty cycle slightly.
It depends on what you mean by "let it get cold" and how good your insulation is and a number of other factors.
But thermal mass can be a big thing. My house isn't even all that well insulated, and when it is 0º F outside, it only drops about 10 degrees if the furnace is off all day.
Not everyone commute with an ICE vehicle too