Saturday, April 25, 2009

冷凝各地 Condensation Everywhere


On my way to work one morning I noticed that the floor outside my apartment was wet. The painted concrete gets mopped regularly so I didn't think anything of it. When I got downstairs the tiled steps were all wet too. The stairs up to the back patio of my office building, and the patio itself, were also all wet. The stone floors inside the lobby of my office building were wet too. It seemed like every floor had been mopped at the very same time and was still drying. The floors in the stairwells were wet, on each floor of our office building, even the walls were wet. I finally concluded that no one had mopped any where. 

I talked with Chen Yu who said that there are a couple days like this every year. I don't know what temperature the threshold is, but when winter turns to spring the air outside heats up faster than the thermal mass of the buildings. It takes a couple days for the building to heat up so as they are cooler than the humid air around them condensation forms EVERYWHERE. It was pretty interesting, and potentially very slippery.

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