Ambient heating turned on in Beijing on 11/15. Which means that the office is now much hotter than it was last week. My apartment is also warmer by quite a bit now. The heating units here aren't anything like the electric-powered forced air units in California (where it never gets that cold, really) but are more similar to college/institution style radiators. Think a bunch of large "coils" that have some sort of liquid running through them.
Generally speaking, this works just fine. Except when you're on a south-facing side of the building and the default heating level is set to 25C. That's where the air conditioning comes in. I find it absolutely ridiculous to have air conditioning when it's 0C outside, but that makes sense when the air quality is...
The other unfortunate thing is that you can really only control the indoor air quality if you are talking about very well-insulated, enclosed places. My office is not one of these. It's "holey" -- lots of holes all over the place, including people going out on the balcony to smoke, the stairwells connected to the basement carpark, etc. So the air quality in the office varies a lot.
I haven't quite figured out exactly how much it varies, but I'll start doing some testing on that soon. Hoping some of the data will help to justify additional filtering in the office. Or... some other change? We shall see. I've already started working from home in the worst circumstances.
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