Over fall break, Elizabethtown College’s Facilities Department made the decision to switch over from cooling to heating. For those in Schlosser, Brinser and the Hackman Apartments, that means they can now only use the heating on their unit. For Myer, Ober and Royer, that meant their AC units in their window were made not unusable through adding zip ties around the plugs of the unit.
For Facilities, this is a decision they have to make every semester.
“At some point each semester, Facilities needs to make the change from heating season to cooling season in the spring and from cooling season to heating season in the fall. Several dorms and apartments are only able to produce either heating or cooling, and the buildings are not able to provide both at the same time. This means Facilities needs to decide, mostly based on weather forecast, when there is a bigger need for heat over cooling and vice versa,” Director of Facilities Management Jerry Schauber said.
Many students, while understanding that the change needs to happen at some point in the year, had issues with the time of the year and the lack of direct communication about when it would occur. In the campus news email sent by the College the week prior, students were not made aware that facilities would be changing the system and in the cases of dorms with AC units, like Myer, Ober and Royer, that facilities would be coming into their rooms and putting zip ties on the units.
Students who stayed behind for fall break were surprised by the facilities members coming in and those who went home were surprised when they returned. The announcement of the change came out on Monday, Oct. 14. with the campus news of that week, days after the change had occurred and students had already discovered it on their own.
“Typically, the switch from AC to heat is something I don’t think much of, but this year, I was impacted by the abrupt change that happened with little warning,” Senior Stephanie Motz said. “My roommate and I have a service animal and were concerned about the lack of communication that was put out to students who own them. I think a lot of the confusion and backlash could have been solved if proper communication was put in order.”
The temperatures also had not changed enough for a lot of students to feel comfortable not having AC.
“It was literally 75 degrees the day after ACs got tied up, and it’s been consistently warm since,” Junior Percy Lachman said. “In Myer, it gets so hot at night it’s difficult to sleep because they keep the heat so ridiculously high.”
While students had issues with the way things were handled this year, facilities often do the change from cooling to heating over fall break so that it is least disruptive to students and found that temperatures were lower in the days before the change was made.
“When evaluating the decision-making process early last week, the high temperature for each day never got above 75 degrees and the low temperature for the day was in the 30s. At that time, it was decided that the need for heating in buildings would be greater than the need for cooling for the remainder of the year. It was also decided, to create the least impact on students, to perform the changeover while students were on fall break,” Schauber said.
With upcoming weeks having high temperatures in the 70 degrees and 60 degrees, people within these dorms will have to adjust to not having the same access to cooling through opening windows, relying on personal fans and even sometimes taking off the zip ties. Even though removing the zip ties is prohibited, many students resort to that when feeling warm.
“I wish we had more control over the temperature, but instead everyone just checks if maintenance left their zip tie loose enough to slide off,” Lachman said
Ideally, the warmer weather will not go on for too much longer as was predicted as fall continues on and eventually becomes winter, so students can feel fully satisfied with the temperature of their rooms and their dorms as a whole.
