Tempronics Desk Chair May Help End an Office Battle

If you work in an office, you’re familiar with the seemingly endless battle over temperature. One person is always hot, another is always cold…in the winter it’s a million degrees, and in the summer it’s so cold you can see your breath. Until now, everyone has had to make do with always having a sweater (or a blanket), or a fan, or a small space heater, or some other means of heating or cooling your own personal space. Tempronics offers up a chair that can do all that for you, albeit at a pretty steep cost.

What this chair does is heat or cool, depending on ambient temperature in the room. It looks just like a regular office chair, and the power supply is supposed to only draw 75 watts (comparable to that of a laptop computer). In tests where the room temperature ranged as far as 61F (16C) and 84F (29C), users remained perfectly comfortable in their chairs. That’s really all there is to offer from the employee side, but it’s pretty huge.

When you look at the benefits to the employer, you get into the good stuff. Comfortable employees are more productive and tend to remain with the company longer. In addition, if each person is controlling their own temperature, you don’t have to spend the thousands of dollars on air conditioning and heating that is required now to heat and cool an entire room. It’s also environmentally friendly, since you can raise the temperature in summer and lower it in winter. This could save between 30 and 70% on HVAC. Isn’t it nice that you can be green while also saving money?

Price is where things kind of fall apart. Granted, it’s been years since I’ve priced office chairs, and the company claims these are comparable in cost to other high-end office chairs that don’t have heating or cooling, but they start at $1,100.00 US. The more you buy, the cheaper they are, but the least amount you’re going to pay is $800.00 US. But, if you compare the savings to the initial cost, it’s really not that bad.

Source: Red Ferret