One of the perfectly sensible reactions to my entry on realizing that we needed two sorts of temperature alerts is to suggest that we directly monitor the air conditioners in our machine rooms, so that we don't have to try to assess how healthy they are from second hand, indirect sources like the temperature of the rooms. There are some practical problems, but a broader problem is that by and large they're not 'our' air conditioners. By this I mean that while the air conditioners and the entire building belongs to the university, neither 'belong' to my department and we can't really do stuff to them.

There are probably many companies who have some split between who's responsible for maintaining a building (and infrastructure things inside it) and who is currently occupying (parts of) the building, but my sense is that universities (or at least mine) take this to a more extreme level than usual. There's an entire (administrative) department that looks after buildings and other physical infrastructure, and they 'own' much of the insides of buildings, including the air conditioning units in our machine rooms (including the really old one ). Because those air conditioners belong to the building and the people responsible for it, we can't go ahead and connect monitoring up to the AC units or tap into any native monitoring they might have.

(Since these aren't our AC units, we haven't even asked. Most of the AC units are old enough that they probably don't have any digital monitoring, and for the new units the manufacturer probably considers that an extra cost option. Nor can we particularly monitor their power consumption; these are industrial units, with dedicated high-power circuits that we're not even going to get near. Only university electricians are supposed to touch that sort of stuff.)

I believe that some parts of the university have a multi-level division of responsibility for things. One organization may 'own' the building, another 'owns' the network wiring in the walls and is responsible for fixing it if something goes wrong, and a third 'owns' the space (ie, gets to use it) and has responsibility for everything inside the rooms. Certainly there's a lot of wiring within buildings that is owned by specific departments or organizations; they paid to put it in (although possibly through shared conduits), and now they're the people who control what it can be used for.

( We have run a certain amount of our own fiber between building floors, for example. I believe that things can get complicated when it comes to renovating space for something, but this is fortunately not one of the areas we have to deal with; other people in the department look after that level of stuff.)

I've been inside the university for long enough that all of this feels completely normal to me, and it even feels like it makes sense. Within a university, who is using space is something that changes over time, not just within an academic department but also between departments. New buildings are built, old buildings are renovated, and people move around, so separating maintaining the buildings from who occupies them right now feels natural.

(In general, space is a constant struggle at universities .)