conned by air-con

When you enter an air-conditioned room and want it to get cooled faster, do you have the habit of grabbing the remote control and punching the down button until the digit shows 16? (or, zer0 if possible)

Actually it doesn't work that way. An air-conditioner basically has 2 modes: on and off. Ie, either it is full blasting cold air, or it is blowing nothing. When you set the thermostat to 25 degrees Celsius, the air con will cool the room to 25 and try to maintain it there. Setting it to 16 does not make the room temperature reach 25 faster. The rate of cooling is constant. So it will just overshoot 25, go down to 16, then when people feel too cold, they set the thermostat back to 25. In a more crude and oversimplified way, the thermostat trips the circuit when the set temperature is reached.

Argh, screw the engineering. Who cares as long as you feel unscientifically good?

(the other day we were at TCC when some of us saw that the aircon wasn't switched on. So we asked the staff if she could lower the temperature. Her reply was "there's only on and off" -_-" K, that set doesn't even have a thermostat. Actually if I'm not wrong, public buses' air-con also only has on and off mode. What can be adjusted is the fan speed though.)