Facility Manager Log - 2021-02-19

The severe winter weather is still a concern throughout Texas. While temperatures are rising to more comfortable levels, the effects of the winter storm are still lingering. We expect that if there is a power outage, it will likely not be prolonged. Therefore, there is little concern that all the HVAC systems will engage simultaneously. With this in mind, I activated all the rooftop units (RTUs) this morning. The facility has climbed to a more comfortable level of 65 degrees F.

I did have one strange request by one of my tenants. As a visual reminder, I kept the lights slightly dimmed while we were operating at diminished power. The tenants seemed to like the lighting, requesting if we could keep it the same. They claim they felt more productive as a result of the dimmer lighting. This is contra all studies that show that proper lighting is more conductive to higher productivity. However, their offices, which they lease from us, are typically operating with the lights out. So, I think they have some form of confirmation bias going on. Stil, I met them in the middle by only lighting the indirect lights and leaving the direct lights turned off.

Other than that, the only other drama has been rescheduling for room reservations and an occupant who is not paying membership coming in to use our facility. Given the unusual circumstances, we are letting that slide. However, we will have to bring up the stowaway issue if it continues next week.

One problem we had was that below a certain temperature, the cooling for our server rooms no longer functions, which makes them rooms overheat unless we take other measures. We did learn that the MDF finds an equilibrium temperature so long as the RTU does not add heat. The IDF is another matter. We will be leaving powering up the mini splits to the server rooms to cool them over the weekend in case temperatures rise above the functional point. This way we can be sure not to melt our servers.

TGIF