smokehard

I’m pretty sure I noticed these ‘things’ on the roofs of buildings when I first came to Seoul and assumed they were simply water tanks of some kind. It wasn’t until I started my new job that I was able to get up-close and personal with one of these mysterious devices. For the first seven months, I’d smoke on the roof and wonder what they were for. I casually walked around them, sniffed them, and looked for clues. At first, there were two of them - one on each side of the roof - but with some recent construction, only one remains. My co-workers didn’t know what it was (or didn’t feel like trying to explain), and so the mystery continued; until now!

On a recent ‘sweat inducing’ day I noticed that there was no air conditioner in the office. I asked my boss if there was one hidden somewhere. He laughed and said that in the summer they simply pumped cold water through the radiators. I asked him if it worked and he said it didn’t. I won’t lie, I was a bit depressed. I don’t take well to hot office environments. Nevertheless, it never occurred to me that those contraptions on the roof were responsible for cooling the water being pumped through the radiators until I witnessed, first-hand, the glorious mediocre power of water cooled by gravity.

I still don’t know what this thing is called and I have yet to find anything on the internet about it. If any of you know, post a comment so that I can research this more thoroughly. I do wonder if they use less electricity than modern-era air conditioners, and whether or not they actually work (we have yet to turn on the ‘summer-mode’ radiator in the office)?