Winter comes early at Hak-gwan. Some say the building’s lecture halls are giant refrigerators.
Students and professors from College of Liberal Arts, who uses the Hak-gwan building, complains about the heating system in Hak-gwan.
“It is so cold inside Hak-gwan,” said Kim On-you (Chinese Literature, 2). “We are not even asking the school to rebuild, but I hope they at least fix the windows or something.”
Like many buildings around campus, Hak-gwan runs on an automatic central heating system. The system activates from December to March when the inside temperature falls under 18 to 20 degrees Celsius. However, the heating system is not programmed to run automatically during November. The Office of maintenance manually regulates the building temperature level. They do not have set rule but they manage the inside temperature to 18 Celsius degrees.
“For November, it is hard to keep the inside temperatures to be above 18 Celcius degrees since the temperature gap between day and night are big,” said Ro Jeong-ho, who manages the campus heating systems for the Maintenace Office. “Besides Hak-gwan’s heating system is fifty years old.”
Large lecture halls in Hak-gwan have cast-iron steam radiators. Smaller rooms, such as professor’s offices or laboratories, use fan heaters.
The comparatively-recently installed fan heaters heat a room sufficiently, but the radiators were installed when the building was built in 1963.
The radiators in lecture halls, which have an average of 20 folds per unit, cover up to 33 square meters.
Large lecture halls in Hak-gwan have average of seven to eight 20-fold radiators.
Since they were installed, the school has not renewed or increased the number of radiators in each room.
“The heating system in Hak-gwan is old and it is true it cannot properly heat up the rooms,” said Ro. “However, the school currently does not have plans to refurbish or upgrade the existing heating system.”