We all get a bit hot under the collar in office air-con wars

Nothing splits a room like an air-conditioning unit. Do you prefer your office’s cranked up to full blast, or idling silently on stand-by? Frosted windows, or drooping houseplants? Room temperature is rarely personal — instead, it’s a compromise.

This breeds discontent. Ever since the first modern air-con unit hummed into life in 1902 — but especially in these febrile times — we have argued and argued about how high or low to crank the dial. I’ve often wondered why temperature is taken so personally. It is almost wilfully divisive.

As a child, one of the weirder pastimes I enjoyed was observing a Sisyphean power struggle unfold at the bottom of our staircase. Like parenting’s Newton’s Cradle, mum would sweep past and turn the thermostat down with a swish, only for dad to stomp past minutes later and jack it back up again.

“Cool, with a gentle breeze, please,” was mother’s stated preference. “I don’t like cold. I like gentle loving warmth”, replied dad.

Some things mankind was not meant to know — and foremost among them is how to adjust a thermostat. The tyranny of choice makes us miserable, but why? “There is an oft-cited study published on nature.com that notes how building temperatures, once set to the comfort preferences of Sixties-era men in suits, disregard the “thermal comfort” of female staffers,” wrote the New York Times this week.

And a German academic study, reported on in The Atlantic in May, asserted that “women don’t just prefer warmer office temperatures” but “perform better in them, too”. Given a series of maths and verbal questions, when the room was warmer, women answered more of the questions and got more of them right.

“They probably asked about three people,” is mum’s response. “In the straw poll of 10 women I’ve just asked they all said ‘cool’.”

But why not dig down further? The reason we moan about room temperature is because even our own preferences change throughout the day. The circadian rhythm of our body means we reach maximum temperature early evening, lowest in the early morning.

The British Medical Journal reported in 2017 that, rather than having a consistent “standard temperature” as taught at medical school, they vary person to person. So we’re all fusspots.

The solution? Increasingly, it’s tech. This January, the Embr Wave was launched, a thermostat-cum-wristwatch that makes the user feel hotter or cooler. A team of scientists at MIT are experimenting with polymers and bacteria in the hope they might “grow wearables” — clothing, for example — with arteries to hold cooled liquids or gas. They can already 3D-print glass structures with “spatial pockets” designed to be filled with such liquid, as well as “biocompatible synthetic skins” for bodies.

Or, you can grin and bear it. After all, only snowflakes melt in the heat.