room temperature

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Room temperature is a general term describing common indoor temperatures.

Comfort levels

The American Society of Heating, Refrigerating, and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) has listings for suggested temperatures and air flow rates in different types of buildings and different environmental circumstances. A comfortable room temperature depends on individual needs and other factors. According to the West Midlands Public Health Observatory (UK),^[1] an adequate level of warmth for older people is 21 °C (70 °F) in the living room and 18 °C (64 °F) in other occupied rooms, although most people (at least in the UK) will find this quite warm; 24 °C (75 °F) is stated as the maximum comfortable room temperature.^[2] Due to variations in humidity and likely clothing, recommendations for summer and winter may vary; one for summer is 23 °C (73 °F) to 26 °C (79 °F), with that for winter being 20 °C (68 °F) to 23 °C (73 °F), although by other considerations the maximum should be below 25 °C (77 °F) - for sick building syndrome avoidance, below 22 °C (72 °F).^[3]

Scientific use

For scientific work, room temperature is taken to be about 20 to 25 degrees Celsius with an average of 23°C (about 73 degrees Fahrenheit or 296 Kelvin).^[4] For numerical convenience, either 20 °C (68 °F) or 300 K (80 °F) is often used, without being specified as "room temperature".^{[citation needed]} However, room temperature is not a defined scientific term, unlike Standard Temperature and Pressure (STP); admittedly, STP has several slightly different definitions.

Ambient versus room temperature

Room temperature implies a temperature inside a temperature-controlled building. Ambient temperature simply means "the temperature of the surroundings" and will be the same as room temperature indoors. In many languages, such as Spanish, there is an expression for ambient temperature, but no distinct translation for room temperature.^[5]

See also

• Ambient food
• Psychrometrics, the study of moist air

External links

This article incorporates information from this version of the equivalent article on the Simple English Wikipedia.

References