A Christmas Mystery: The Strange Case of the Car Park that Never Froze

I don't normally bang on about the day-job but here's a Christmas Mystery from my tech world about The Car Park That Was Never Frozen. Not quite a ghost story although it does involve mysterious energies from beneath the ground...

A few years ago there was a UK software vendor that moved to new offices on an industrial estate just outside Grantham. When the company enjoyed its first winter there, they were pleasantly surprised to see that despite its location (on the side of a steep and windswept hill) and the fact the winter was unusually harsh and snowy, the company’s outdoor car park remained free of ice and snow.

However while that was an unexpected bonus, the enormous electricity bill that arrived the following spring was anything but welcome. What worried the management was they knew the bill was impossibly large, not least because the offices were still relatively under-occupied – and they kept a tight ship on expenditure, in terms not wasting electricity on unnecessary lighting and heating.

More digging into the mystery of the large power bills followed, including contacting the previous owners to see what their experience had been. Then the proverbial penny dropped!

The previous owners had been the regional electricity generating company and, having effectively unlimited free electricity at their disposal, they had installed underground heating beneath the car park to keep it ice free in winter.

So the company switched off the outdoor heating – and the size of the electricity bills immediately plummeted. That’s the good news. The bad news is now the car park suffers from the ice and snow just like all the other car parks on the estate.