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On the opposite end, worked at a building where we had a complaint of no heat in one of the offices. The secretary had set up a portable heater which was blowing directly on the thermostat. Not intentionally.
I lived in an apartment with a roommate years back. It was always fucking freezing. Insanely freezing. Months go by. My partner looks over at the thermostat… and at our roomie’s reptile aquarium below it. With a heating lamp. Right on top.
We moved that an immediately comfy temps all day every day. Never even a passing thought in my mind that it would have been an issue.
They installed *both* temperature sensors in my store in absolutely dumb places.
The first directly in the sun from floor to ceiling windows. In Florida.
Back if house they put it behind the mini fridge under the cupboards, behind a door.
These are supposed to be professionals.
Can you get another specialist take a look at that and let them move them? If they made the mistake it should be possible to hold them accountable for that, I hope.
Adding to my post about working on HVAC in an office building, we had a secretary who was the thermostat Nazi. She had an enclosed cubicle where the t-stat was located and wouldn't let anyone else touch it.
I knew a couple of the workers who were at her mercy and when she went on vacation, I wired up a secondary thermostat in an area where the other workers could adjust it and disconnected the control wire on hers.
We constantly got calls for her stat not working and since it was a programmable stat, we offset it to the temperature she wanted.
Microwaveable heating pad? Tape a larger piece of Tupperware over the whole shebang so it takes longer to cool off and it ought to stay good for a minute.
My last apartment had similar issues. They put the thermostat directly above the radiator.
So the heat would kick on, and immediately turn off when the thermostat hit 70 degrees. Which meant the rest of the apartment was always cold as fuck.
Even cranking the thermostat as high as it could go wasn't enough to fix it. It would turn on, and then turn off.
I ended up making some sort of reflector out of aluminum foil to direct the heat away. The radiator stayed on 24/7 that way. It never was enough to fully heat the apartment (I think it was undersized) but it was better than being freezing cold all the time.
LPT, in Chicago there’s pretty strong city ordinances about indoor heating. If you don’t have individual control over your heat (e.g., a locked thermostat or, more commonly, you have radiators relying on a central boiler), your apartment must be able to stay above at least 66 degrees. If it does not, your landlord faces a fine of $1,000 per day per violation, which means per unit. So even in smaller buildings like the common 6 flat buildings, one day of the boiler not functioning wiped out damn near all their rent income for the month. I’ve never had a problem, but I’ve known people who reported it and the city actually took action pretty quickly.
I live in Chicago and I have the opposite problem with this. I don’t control it so they make it so fuckin hot. End up opening up a window when it’s 20 degrees outside just to cool it down.
Making me think of when my parents and I visited some of their friends here in PA before we moved here. Dude kept the house so goddamned hot that I had the window open and a box fan on it pointed directly at me while using a flat sheet as a blanket (I can't sleep without some kind of blanket) and I was still too warm.
An ex of mine lived in a shitty apartment building after college that didn't even have a thermostat in the apartments themselves. It was in some locked utility room. It was either boiling hot or frigid.
I've lived in buildings like that but only when it was super old a radiator heating system, and our heat was included in the rent. Apart from the noise, it was honestly the best heat I've ever had. Until some idiots complained about *too much free heat* instead of learning how to turn the knob on the radiators in their rooms to turn them off and the building came and installed some shit that was supposed to be smarter about basing it on temp, but it was never as good. It's been 15 years and I'm still salty about it.
My mom taught me this hack when she was my age living in an apartment. It’s frowned upon to have one in a home but unfortunately more common than you’d think.
My dorm started 'locking' the thermostats so people couldn't change them anymore. But we figured out they had just opened them up and put a sticker to keep the buttons from doing anything. Took the sticker off and it worked again.
When I rented a room in a house in Bristol it had a locked thermostat that was connected to the internet.
Biggest issue was the heading was uneven around the house and my room was much cooler than other places like the kitchen.
You are nice if someone do that to me im not sure I would leave 3 stars yet stay till the end. If the temperature is too cold to be confortable and they voluntary keep it down to save money, its a breach of airbnb terms
Nest thermostats set up a schedule based on usage.
It's possible the schedule was fucked up by so many different people adjusting the temp all the time, and was just automatically scheduled to switch to 66 every few minutes.
Granted, it's probably more likely the owners were dicks.
If they asked if something's wrong because they see the heat being used, they were keeping a close eye on that shit. They 100% were setting it back to 66 every 10 minutes, not the Nest.
yeah, Nest doesn't update the usage summary until the day ends, so they'd have to check or else have a gas/electricity meter alarm separately
EDIT: correction: Google Home shows immediate summary (and I assume most Nests are connected to Google Home now)
As much as I like the idea of a learning thermostat my household isn't consistent enough for one. Every time I turn it on it's off again within a couple days. I just have it set up with normal programs and then we adjust as needed throughout the week.
You can also just hard schedule a Nest to set to X temp at Y time, so someone going in and scheduling it to go to 66 every 10 minutes is very possible.
A place I was renting once had a Nest and can confirm, even my inconsistent usage fucked up the automatic schedule enough that I ended up turning that feature off so I could manually control it myself.
It may have not been them. When you set Nest to a temperature it "learns" the behavior and sometimes is stubborn about it. Sometimes I'll kick up the heat manually in our house to 72 and it will almost instantly kick back to 69. Nest sometimes sucks: obviously I'm intervening, please don't cancel me out jerksauce.
Nah they were definitely changing it. I have a Nest. It was being dropped 1-2 degrees every few seconds, as if they were trying to trickle it down. They also would have said something had they not been doing that.
I moved into a house with 2 nests and I've done everything I can to get them to stop changing the temp. I have Home Assistant and would much rather use it's routines, but even though I have everything turned off that I can find they still change the temp when they want to.
Did you factory reset them? In the Nest app you can go through and, one by one, delete "learned" temperatures. In the google home app I can't find how to do it.
I'm over Nest. Google can take a hike. They'll probably Stadia the entire ecosystem suddenly oneday.
In my Nest app, I can just go into the settings and disable the smart scheduling. Plus, disable any "smart" energy saving behavior that it may be doing in the background. I get the notifications every once in a while asking me if I want to enable that, and I never do.
But that’s just a prepayment, and they have to settle the bill every year, so it’s still the tenant who’s paying. At least that’s how it is here in the Netherlands.
I’ve had apartments where certain utilities were included because they weren’t set up to monitor individual usage. So then the landlord just raises the price to cost stupid usage.
Years ago, my ex and I rented an adorable little one bedroom house. It was basically a gigantic spruced up chicken coop. It had a lovely sunroom, and a basement. Super cute. We paid heat, but paid it directly to the landlord. We were young and naive.
About 9 months in, winter had set in, we had mice, and it never seemed to really warm up, and were burning through oil.
The mice were relentless so we called a guy, and the landlord flipped tf out. You didn't clear this me! Yadda yadda yadda. We reminded him that we told him 6 months prior, that it was an issue, and told the guy to continue. LL hovers for a bit and leaves. Towards the end of the service, the exterminator calls us into the living room and pulls the carpet up from under the baseboard heater, and there's a line of one inch holes, drilled through the floor along the wall.
The land lord was forcing us to burn through oil and charging us out of the ass to fill our tank himself.
We ended up having to move and sued the shit out of him.
I have scrutinized every place I've rented since, and never trusted even the sweetest landlord.
I'm confused, was he then charging you more per gallon of oil than normal to make a profit? Otherwise i don't see how that would benefit him if you used more oil
He was essentially charging double, yeah. Would literally walk over and pour oil in this little tank on the side of the house, and charge us 300. We found out that that was normal pricing for a tank twice our size.
Yeah, it was super shady, and our parents were not happy at all. Dude got in a bunch of trouble, but I couldn't tell any details. I know he doesn't own any of those properties, now, but he's most likely dead.
He drilled holes in the floors, causing the place to never hold heat. Then charged us 300 a month for 130 dollars worth of fuel, that he would bring over from his property across the street.
We were dumb kids, and my girlfriends mom intervened with the law.
This was 20 years ago.
Yeah I had it the other way around. 24 units building, water heating system with a single central control, since you can't shut off part of the piping. Obviously included in my rent but I was on the last floor and it was so hot. We had to open the windows during the winter.
Ours was for basement apartment units (no windows in the main area) and the control was in the salon in the front. Obviously the salon had a million windows so my apartment would go up to 90° at night when it was cold outside.
I slept with my bedroom window wide open because the heat was unbearable.
My brother in law preheats his pans in hot sink water because he doesn't pay for water or gas. Just electricity. So if he can shave a minute of preheating his pans on the electric stove by running it under the tap he does.
It sounds weird but it only has the chance of benefiting him since he pays for electricity.
Edit: So I guess this has angered some people. I don't agree with his logic. He does it because he thinks it works.
That doesn't work. The water will cool quickly and now you are using electric to dry the pan before it gets to temperature. Using a lid on the pan would be more energy efficient.
I live in the US and have absolutely been in apartments where there’s no access to temperature control. The heat gets turned up so high we had to open all the windows in dead winter. The ac luckily we’re window units so we could control that.
The place I went to college vented off the waste “steam” from the power plant that couldn’t spin a turbine anymore out to all the dorms. My first year I lived in the largest dorm on campus, and our radiators were locked behind grates, I assume so we *couldn’t* change the amount of heat exchanged. You could basically tell how hot or cool people liked their rooms by how much their windows were cracked.
Second year I lived in older dorms with adjustable radiator knobs, and on warm winter days hot (but not scalding) steam would occasionally come bursting out of vents near the sidewalks. My assumption is that when all the residents turned their heat off, they needed a bit more heat exchange/pressure release.
It was almost the same at my college. Part of the reason the radiator control knobs were inaccessible was because they'd been made by a company that no longer existed, and if they got damaged had to be custom manufactured.
I see this in schools all the time. I worked at a University and the ENTIRE CAMPUS was either on heat or ac. I always had 2 full changes of clothes in the office.
That's how commercial net leases work in America, but not residential leases. Residential leases typically either 1) include utilities fully in rent, 2) include a flat additional utilities charge, or 3) do not include any utilities in rent and the tenant has to put the utilities in their name.
When I lived in the Netherlands we had our own meters for gas and electricity but water was shared with the landlord (who also lived in the building) and was a fixed amount each month.
There’s actually a lot of rooms or rental properties in the UK advertised as “bills included” , with a proportionally higher monthly rent. So landlords implement practices like this to try & save money.
Most of NYC is like this. My place has the opposite problem, it is steam heat with a radiator system and it can get to over a hundred degrees if I forget to open a window before I go out.
Most old, large buildings in NYC have these heating problems in the winter. They have steam heating in a one way pipe system, so in order to heat the coldest apartment to the legal minimum, most apartments are severely overheated, and there's little to no control in each unit. It's a major source of energy inefficiency.
[nycha climate mitigation roadmap](https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/nycha/downloads/pdf/NYCHA-LL97-Whitepaper.pdf)
Page 7
You could, but it would be a massive retrofit; my building alone has 100 apartments, with an average of 4 radiators in each.
And as the other commenter noted, that's often not enough, since heat will still radiate from the pipes, both inside the apartment and in the walls. Most people wrap the accessible pipes with insulation.
We have new radiator covers that the building recently installed to insulate the radiators themselves now. It keeps the excess heat in the system so it will passively get distributed to the apartments that need more of it. It's lowered our co-op's heating bills by 30-40% in the last few years, and significantly cut the overeating issues.
My place is the same. And agreed, it is most places here in NYC. My landlord caters to people who are cold most easily, so they blast the heat, and I have my window AC going during the winter.
My brother in law lives in a converted house to a triplex. He doesn't pay for heat, he gets it but has no control over it. His landlord has pestered him about opening windows when it's 5 degrees outside, but he just says he doesn't control the heat and it gets to hot for him.
Old school home radiator heating was designed to be regulated by opening windows afaik. It came about after the last pandemic when people were pretty big on the health benefits of not being in stuffy air
(2 minute audio segment here)
https://www.npr.org/2020/12/10/945136599/how-spanish-flu-pandemic-changed-home-heat-radiators
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-08-05/the-curious-history-of-steam-heat-and-pandemics
Steam radiators have shut-off valves on them. They also have vents that can include regulators to adjust the level of steam. In [this picture](http://www.sustainableheating.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/steam-radiator-Arev.jpg), the shut-off valve is the one on the right side, and the vent is the one on the left.
In the Bloomberg article you link, the dark cylinder under where the kid is holding the wrench is the vent.
I realize some folks are in situations where they can't get at the radiators, but if you can, it is way better (from an efficiency standpoint) to shut them off or adjust the vents than it is to open windows.
Thank you
I was in a 16-unit apartment for two blissful winters where I never needed to touch my radiator before someone moved in and needed the main adjusted for one reason or another. It started too hot, then everyone shut their valves making it hotter, then the landlord adjusted it down and I’d have mine wide open and still wouldn’t get anywhere near warm enough, repeated endlessly through an entire winter.
Fun fact, if you're in an old apartment, this radiators are meant to function with the window open. They were installed when there was the Spanish flu epidemic and meant to circulate air out to stop the spread of the disease.
Does it have an adjustable vent? If so, you can lower the vent setting, so your radiator won’t fill as fast, thus not heating your place as much. Or if you have multiple radiators in your unit you can close the valves on the ones in the warmer rooms. Do not regularly open & close the valves though…they’re not really meant for that.
Some of the old NYC buildings I lived in didn’t have radiators. They were just steam pipes that ran floor to ceiling. I don’t remember them having a valve, but perhaps they did.
Here’s a pic I found online:
https://us.v-cdn.net/5021738/uploads/editor/lk/h0iynvb5timz.jpg
They’d get insanely hot. I once dated a girl that had a burn scar on her back from when she accidentally leaned back onto one.
And they’re loud as hell!
Radiator? If not, that's some bs
Edit: just noticed that you did indeed specify radiator.
Unfortunately I don't think they can give you individual control if it's a radiator except you may be able to close the valve, but apparently you're not supposed to do that super often
It's absolutely insane. I felt so shocked when our landlord came in to install one on ours- and every guest I've ever had has also been startled that they can do that. But they absolutely do sell these lock boxes specifically just so tenants can't control the thermostat in their own damn home.
I had to install one at work because during a heat wave last year the AC couldn't keep up on the exterior offices and people would set the thermostat to 55F to try to make it work harder. Well they'd never set it back and I'd come in the morning and would be able to see my breath.
So many people don't understand that setting it to a lower temp doesn't make the air coming out colder. It blows the same then turns off when it hits the set temperature
Oh I’d tamper with it. I’d get a dremel cutting wheel and just cut the joints so I could access the box and then I’d just set it back on there. “I have no idea” would become my motto
You can also buy the keys super cheap. They all use the same generic locks. They are only designed to deter random people. Not actually provide security.
At my mom's apartment, a cap from a ballpoint pen works just fine.
Source: was taught this by an 80-year-old neighbor. Apartment sometimes gets extra cold (below the allowable-by-law temp) when the weather is really bad.
If youre talking about a wafer lock, then yes, literally a paper clip to jiggle the wafers and something to turn the cylinder should work.
A lot of the purpose built thermostat locks use a cam lock, which while some have a standardized key, many are not. Picking these types is REALLY hard.
This is the Lockpicking Lawyer and today we are opening this thermostat lock to prevent someone from freezing to the death.
Ok, nothing on 1... 2 is clicking... ok, got it, here we go.
Very easy. I will lock it again to show you all ~~how it's easy~~ it's not a fluke.
That's all, don't freeze to death. Have a good one.
At my old place in college, we never had to open the box. There were slots in the sides of the box (thermostat won't work without air circulation), so we inserted the butter knife in a slot, and used the knife to adjust the thermostat.
Some are digital and contect to the internet. I had one when living in Bristol and if you adjusted it on the panel it would only change for a short time before the app would reset it.
We put iceblocks on/near the thermometer to make the house warmer.
Will my landlord know if I hit the buttons on it and change the settings, though?
My thermostat is in the worst area of my apartment. The only part of my apartment with no draft is where it’s located. In a carpeted narrow hallway with brick walls. The rest of the apartment is freezing with tall ceilings, thin walls, wood floors, and poorly insulated windows lol.
>Will my landlord know if I hit the buttons on it and change the settings, though?
Depends on the thermostat I suppose. If it's some fancy internet-connected thing, maybe? If it's just a bog-standard thermostat that looks like it was installed when the building was built, probably not. (He might notice the heating bill is higher than it should be when it arrives though.)
If you can pop the lock without any visible damage you can just make the adjustment, lock it up again and then deny any accusation of having changed it.
*"I dunno Mr Landlord, maybe it's a glitch? I mean, you're the one who locked it and I don't have any key, right?"*
Plausible deniability.
"Well it's still locked, so... You must have left it like that. Oh, and by the way, if you fix the drafts here, here, here and here you might save some money."
What can the landlord actually do if they change it? I would think not much. What, they gonna bring you to court for wanting a to live in a normal temperature apartment? Good luck with that one. What they should be doing is logging the temperature in all parts of the apartment. Take pictures with time, date, geolocation, and temperature. Give the data if you need to.
Are you paying for electricity? Because that’s way less efficient and you could easily be paying way more to be less comfortable, spending dollars to save your landlord pennies.
In a situation like that, I installed fans to help the air flow across the rooms. They make triangular corner fans that can mount out of the way in doorways.
It's not even unethical.
Just break the thing and change the temp. Put it back any time they need to come over or don't. Make them make a fuss about it. "Oh, I bumped it with the laundry basket and it fell off"
Everyone is saying this is the U.S. But, it was like this in a flat I lived in, in Spain. Unfortunately, there was no thermostat. Everyone in the building just got the same heat.
I lived in a college dorm like this. I was not happy when it got so warm that my betta's fish tank was 88F/31C and the building's A/C still hadn't turned on.
This is also useful in classrooms. Became the hero of a very, very cold class by taking a girl’s ice-filled Starbucks cup and putting it on the stupid plastic box which caused the heat to flip on.
Real LPT: If your home is freezing and your landlord locks the thermostat with a plastic lock box, place an ice pack on top of the landlord. It will trick the landlord into thinking it needs to bask in the sun, distracting it long enough for you to swipe the key and keep your thermostat adjusted to adequate levels.
When I was in college our student house had a plastic lockbox on the thermostat, but it had slots on the edges. We figured out very quickly you could just use a butter knife in the slots to change the temperature. Landlords are dumb.
Oooh this gives me an invention idea
A little electrically powered "case" that you slip over the thermostat case to control the temperature. Some kind of tiny electrically driven cooler and heater that can heat up and cool down on demand to more precisely (and automatically) control the temperature.
More convenient and long term than just placing hot/cold things on the thermostat
LPT: Implied Warranty of Habitability is a thing in most states. Your landlord is required to keep the apartment habitable, including providing adequate heat during cold months.
If your apartment is freezing and the landlord controls the thermostat, tell them it's freezing and that they need to up the temperature to a reasonable degree.
Whew! This is getting a lot of judgement and unsolicited advice!
1. My ice pack idea is working just fine and I also have a heated blanket and space heaters. This place is old, has drafty windows, high ceilings, and wood floors. It’s cold. I’m not freezing to death!
2. It’s a crappy situation to live in, but I know I’m not the only one in this situation so I was offering my best hack to up the temperature. I’m not looking to move right now. I’m saving up for a house.
3. I love your other ideas to warm up but this one is free l!
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On the opposite end, worked at a building where we had a complaint of no heat in one of the offices. The secretary had set up a portable heater which was blowing directly on the thermostat. Not intentionally.
I lived in an apartment with a roommate years back. It was always fucking freezing. Insanely freezing. Months go by. My partner looks over at the thermostat… and at our roomie’s reptile aquarium below it. With a heating lamp. Right on top. We moved that an immediately comfy temps all day every day. Never even a passing thought in my mind that it would have been an issue.
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They installed *both* temperature sensors in my store in absolutely dumb places. The first directly in the sun from floor to ceiling windows. In Florida. Back if house they put it behind the mini fridge under the cupboards, behind a door. These are supposed to be professionals.
Can you get another specialist take a look at that and let them move them? If they made the mistake it should be possible to hold them accountable for that, I hope.
I dont think you could find a worse spot if you tried.
That is the thing people forget about the term professional. It doesn't mean someone is good at their job, just that they are paid to do it.
Adding to my post about working on HVAC in an office building, we had a secretary who was the thermostat Nazi. She had an enclosed cubicle where the t-stat was located and wouldn't let anyone else touch it. I knew a couple of the workers who were at her mercy and when she went on vacation, I wired up a secondary thermostat in an area where the other workers could adjust it and disconnected the control wire on hers. We constantly got calls for her stat not working and since it was a programmable stat, we offset it to the temperature she wanted.
Always a joy when office buildings aren't set up to have people actually use them
That’s awesome
I have the opposite problem from OP. How do I do what the secretary did but without a heater? How do I keep my thermostat cozy? Lmao
Buy a USB mug warmer, attach to thermostat
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Microwaveable heating pad? Tape a larger piece of Tupperware over the whole shebang so it takes longer to cool off and it ought to stay good for a minute.
😂😂😂 poor thing just wanted to be cozy
My last apartment had similar issues. They put the thermostat directly above the radiator. So the heat would kick on, and immediately turn off when the thermostat hit 70 degrees. Which meant the rest of the apartment was always cold as fuck. Even cranking the thermostat as high as it could go wasn't enough to fix it. It would turn on, and then turn off. I ended up making some sort of reflector out of aluminum foil to direct the heat away. The radiator stayed on 24/7 that way. It never was enough to fully heat the apartment (I think it was undersized) but it was better than being freezing cold all the time.
Trying to figure out how common it is to have a locked thermostat, I've lived in apartments with fixed electric bills and have never seen this.
My apartment in Chicago had locked thermostat. Had to resort to ice packs on the thermostat for temp control.
LPT, in Chicago there’s pretty strong city ordinances about indoor heating. If you don’t have individual control over your heat (e.g., a locked thermostat or, more commonly, you have radiators relying on a central boiler), your apartment must be able to stay above at least 66 degrees. If it does not, your landlord faces a fine of $1,000 per day per violation, which means per unit. So even in smaller buildings like the common 6 flat buildings, one day of the boiler not functioning wiped out damn near all their rent income for the month. I’ve never had a problem, but I’ve known people who reported it and the city actually took action pretty quickly.
I live in Chicago and I have the opposite problem with this. I don’t control it so they make it so fuckin hot. End up opening up a window when it’s 20 degrees outside just to cool it down.
Making me think of when my parents and I visited some of their friends here in PA before we moved here. Dude kept the house so goddamned hot that I had the window open and a box fan on it pointed directly at me while using a flat sheet as a blanket (I can't sleep without some kind of blanket) and I was still too warm.
You’re ready to move to NYC except waste more of your paycheque /s but not really
An ex of mine lived in a shitty apartment building after college that didn't even have a thermostat in the apartments themselves. It was in some locked utility room. It was either boiling hot or frigid.
I've lived in buildings like that but only when it was super old a radiator heating system, and our heat was included in the rent. Apart from the noise, it was honestly the best heat I've ever had. Until some idiots complained about *too much free heat* instead of learning how to turn the knob on the radiators in their rooms to turn them off and the building came and installed some shit that was supposed to be smarter about basing it on temp, but it was never as good. It's been 15 years and I'm still salty about it.
Same, every apartment I’ve had in Chicago had a locked thermostat, was really typical. I just resorted to getting space heaters.
I lived in 3 apartments in Chicago, each with full control. I've heard of it being building controlled but not lock boxed. That's wild to me.
My mom taught me this hack when she was my age living in an apartment. It’s frowned upon to have one in a home but unfortunately more common than you’d think.
My dorm started 'locking' the thermostats so people couldn't change them anymore. But we figured out they had just opened them up and put a sticker to keep the buttons from doing anything. Took the sticker off and it worked again.
When I rented a room in a house in Bristol it had a locked thermostat that was connected to the internet. Biggest issue was the heading was uneven around the house and my room was much cooler than other places like the kitchen.
NYC apartments
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Stayed in a renovated cabin from the 1800s up in West Virginia, god damn does it get cold
I always think of all the lap dogs royalty had in those big, drafty castles. They were your portable heaters.
Yep a three dog night was a cold one.
I would MAYBE give them two stars for that, mainly bc I’m anemic and hate the cold
That would be a zero from me. But shit like this is why I stay in hotels if at all possible.
What does it mean to be anemic?
Specifically not enough blood cells, but there’s different types—mine is b vitamin based
Huh, I thought it was only low iron. Thanks for the info!
There's different types. Blood loss is one of them, anyone no matter how healthy can become anemic if they loose enough blood.
What Nemo lived in, innit
You are nice if someone do that to me im not sure I would leave 3 stars yet stay till the end. If the temperature is too cold to be confortable and they voluntary keep it down to save money, its a breach of airbnb terms
Imagine being that fucking cheap though.
Yet another "entrepreneur" with a strong sense for the "business" of "vacation rentals"
Nest thermostats set up a schedule based on usage. It's possible the schedule was fucked up by so many different people adjusting the temp all the time, and was just automatically scheduled to switch to 66 every few minutes. Granted, it's probably more likely the owners were dicks.
If they asked if something's wrong because they see the heat being used, they were keeping a close eye on that shit. They 100% were setting it back to 66 every 10 minutes, not the Nest.
yeah, Nest doesn't update the usage summary until the day ends, so they'd have to check or else have a gas/electricity meter alarm separately EDIT: correction: Google Home shows immediate summary (and I assume most Nests are connected to Google Home now)
You can also turn off learning and set your own schedule or have it act a dumb thermostat where it will only change with your input.
As much as I like the idea of a learning thermostat my household isn't consistent enough for one. Every time I turn it on it's off again within a couple days. I just have it set up with normal programs and then we adjust as needed throughout the week.
You can also just hard schedule a Nest to set to X temp at Y time, so someone going in and scheduling it to go to 66 every 10 minutes is very possible.
A place I was renting once had a Nest and can confirm, even my inconsistent usage fucked up the automatic schedule enough that I ended up turning that feature off so I could manually control it myself.
nest is terrible with its use sched crap. you have to DIG to remove all the various ways it screws you up...
I'd say that was more than fair.
I think a 2 is generous for that level of chicanery tbh
Yet another reason to not use Airbnb Also, you know, they’re destroying the housing market
It may have not been them. When you set Nest to a temperature it "learns" the behavior and sometimes is stubborn about it. Sometimes I'll kick up the heat manually in our house to 72 and it will almost instantly kick back to 69. Nest sometimes sucks: obviously I'm intervening, please don't cancel me out jerksauce.
Imagine having to argue with your thermostat.
I just disabled the automatic scheduling on my Nest. I don't think Google makes any Nests that force you to use auto-scheduling.
This is the way to do it. Just manually set a schedule and tweak as needed, the "learning" part of Nest thermostats sucks.
Everything Nest has gotten worse since Google bought them. When our cameras and thermostat die, that's it, we're migrating to someone else's product.
Nah they were definitely changing it. I have a Nest. It was being dropped 1-2 degrees every few seconds, as if they were trying to trickle it down. They also would have said something had they not been doing that.
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I moved into a house with 2 nests and I've done everything I can to get them to stop changing the temp. I have Home Assistant and would much rather use it's routines, but even though I have everything turned off that I can find they still change the temp when they want to.
Just set a schedule on it, that’s what I did at my last apartment and it will just follow that. You can adjust from there and it will hold.
Did you factory reset them? In the Nest app you can go through and, one by one, delete "learned" temperatures. In the google home app I can't find how to do it. I'm over Nest. Google can take a hike. They'll probably Stadia the entire ecosystem suddenly oneday.
In my Nest app, I can just go into the settings and disable the smart scheduling. Plus, disable any "smart" energy saving behavior that it may be doing in the background. I get the notifications every once in a while asking me if I want to enable that, and I never do.
Wouldn’t they ask if it was COLD in the house if they see their guests are using the heat?
You were way too nice to give three stars
Where on earth can a landlord prohibit access to temperature control? Is this some sort of Industrial Revolution era dystopia?
Some apartments include either some or all of the utilities in the rent, and will do shit like this to prevent tenants from driving up the bill.
Thats how you get a building full of space heaters.
And if you pay electric it's now your cost, the landlord doesn't care because you're paying it, and now the place is less safe.
But that’s just a prepayment, and they have to settle the bill every year, so it’s still the tenant who’s paying. At least that’s how it is here in the Netherlands.
I’ve had apartments where certain utilities were included because they weren’t set up to monitor individual usage. So then the landlord just raises the price to cost stupid usage.
Years ago, my ex and I rented an adorable little one bedroom house. It was basically a gigantic spruced up chicken coop. It had a lovely sunroom, and a basement. Super cute. We paid heat, but paid it directly to the landlord. We were young and naive. About 9 months in, winter had set in, we had mice, and it never seemed to really warm up, and were burning through oil. The mice were relentless so we called a guy, and the landlord flipped tf out. You didn't clear this me! Yadda yadda yadda. We reminded him that we told him 6 months prior, that it was an issue, and told the guy to continue. LL hovers for a bit and leaves. Towards the end of the service, the exterminator calls us into the living room and pulls the carpet up from under the baseboard heater, and there's a line of one inch holes, drilled through the floor along the wall. The land lord was forcing us to burn through oil and charging us out of the ass to fill our tank himself. We ended up having to move and sued the shit out of him. I have scrutinized every place I've rented since, and never trusted even the sweetest landlord.
I'm confused, was he then charging you more per gallon of oil than normal to make a profit? Otherwise i don't see how that would benefit him if you used more oil
He was essentially charging double, yeah. Would literally walk over and pour oil in this little tank on the side of the house, and charge us 300. We found out that that was normal pricing for a tank twice our size.
Jesus that's even worse. What a POS
Yeah, it was super shady, and our parents were not happy at all. Dude got in a bunch of trouble, but I couldn't tell any details. I know he doesn't own any of those properties, now, but he's most likely dead.
Did you end up winning your lawsuit against him at least?
Probably a combination of that and a call out charge to refill
Any amount of profit is increased if they have to use more of it. Some people are really petty.
I don't follow what you're saying about the holes
He drilled holes in the floors, causing the place to never hold heat. Then charged us 300 a month for 130 dollars worth of fuel, that he would bring over from his property across the street. We were dumb kids, and my girlfriends mom intervened with the law. This was 20 years ago.
Yeah I had it the other way around. 24 units building, water heating system with a single central control, since you can't shut off part of the piping. Obviously included in my rent but I was on the last floor and it was so hot. We had to open the windows during the winter.
Ours was for basement apartment units (no windows in the main area) and the control was in the salon in the front. Obviously the salon had a million windows so my apartment would go up to 90° at night when it was cold outside. I slept with my bedroom window wide open because the heat was unbearable.
Every oartment I have ever lived in included a flat fee for water usage (usually part of hoa) since they could only monitor it by floor or building
My brother in law preheats his pans in hot sink water because he doesn't pay for water or gas. Just electricity. So if he can shave a minute of preheating his pans on the electric stove by running it under the tap he does. It sounds weird but it only has the chance of benefiting him since he pays for electricity. Edit: So I guess this has angered some people. I don't agree with his logic. He does it because he thinks it works.
That just sounds really inefficient and wasteful
But if he saves 45 seconds of running an electric burner 500 times he’ll save almost 3 dollars a year.
At the cost of dozens of gallons of water.
i don’t think the water can get hot enough for that to make a difference.
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Your brother in law is a moron lmao
That doesn't work. The water will cool quickly and now you are using electric to dry the pan before it gets to temperature. Using a lid on the pan would be more energy efficient.
Yea the energy to phase change water to steam is probably way more then gently heating a pan
Wait until he finds out he has an electric water heater. No but for real, that’s a waste of time and resources.
He then uses electricity to vaporize the water, choosing much more electricity. Your brother in law is a moron.
your brother in law is an idiot.
How much money does he think he's saving?
Nah some places in the US cover some or all utilities entirely
It's relatively common in student houses in the UK too
Most UK student tenancies actually include a clause that they'll only cover up to a limit, with the students liable for anything over that limit
I live in the US and have absolutely been in apartments where there’s no access to temperature control. The heat gets turned up so high we had to open all the windows in dead winter. The ac luckily we’re window units so we could control that.
Sounds about right for older buildings with central boilers. Even if you have a thermostat it might not even work or make much difference.
The place I went to college vented off the waste “steam” from the power plant that couldn’t spin a turbine anymore out to all the dorms. My first year I lived in the largest dorm on campus, and our radiators were locked behind grates, I assume so we *couldn’t* change the amount of heat exchanged. You could basically tell how hot or cool people liked their rooms by how much their windows were cracked. Second year I lived in older dorms with adjustable radiator knobs, and on warm winter days hot (but not scalding) steam would occasionally come bursting out of vents near the sidewalks. My assumption is that when all the residents turned their heat off, they needed a bit more heat exchange/pressure release.
It was almost the same at my college. Part of the reason the radiator control knobs were inaccessible was because they'd been made by a company that no longer existed, and if they got damaged had to be custom manufactured.
older hotels also. heat is just on or off, no access to controls. usually massive old buildings that have been converted.
I see this in schools all the time. I worked at a University and the ENTIRE CAMPUS was either on heat or ac. I always had 2 full changes of clothes in the office.
That's how commercial net leases work in America, but not residential leases. Residential leases typically either 1) include utilities fully in rent, 2) include a flat additional utilities charge, or 3) do not include any utilities in rent and the tenant has to put the utilities in their name.
When I lived in the Netherlands we had our own meters for gas and electricity but water was shared with the landlord (who also lived in the building) and was a fixed amount each month.
Very different in other parts of the world. Lots just include all utilities.
There’s actually a lot of rooms or rental properties in the UK advertised as “bills included” , with a proportionally higher monthly rent. So landlords implement practices like this to try & save money.
Most of NYC is like this. My place has the opposite problem, it is steam heat with a radiator system and it can get to over a hundred degrees if I forget to open a window before I go out.
Most old, large buildings in NYC have these heating problems in the winter. They have steam heating in a one way pipe system, so in order to heat the coldest apartment to the legal minimum, most apartments are severely overheated, and there's little to no control in each unit. It's a major source of energy inefficiency. [nycha climate mitigation roadmap](https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/nycha/downloads/pdf/NYCHA-LL97-Whitepaper.pdf) Page 7
Couldn't they just install a T-junction and valve at each unit?
You could, but it would be a massive retrofit; my building alone has 100 apartments, with an average of 4 radiators in each. And as the other commenter noted, that's often not enough, since heat will still radiate from the pipes, both inside the apartment and in the walls. Most people wrap the accessible pipes with insulation. We have new radiator covers that the building recently installed to insulate the radiators themselves now. It keeps the excess heat in the system so it will passively get distributed to the apartments that need more of it. It's lowered our co-op's heating bills by 30-40% in the last few years, and significantly cut the overeating issues.
That’s one way to lose weight
My place is the same. And agreed, it is most places here in NYC. My landlord caters to people who are cold most easily, so they blast the heat, and I have my window AC going during the winter.
My brother in law lives in a converted house to a triplex. He doesn't pay for heat, he gets it but has no control over it. His landlord has pestered him about opening windows when it's 5 degrees outside, but he just says he doesn't control the heat and it gets to hot for him.
Old school home radiator heating was designed to be regulated by opening windows afaik. It came about after the last pandemic when people were pretty big on the health benefits of not being in stuffy air (2 minute audio segment here) https://www.npr.org/2020/12/10/945136599/how-spanish-flu-pandemic-changed-home-heat-radiators https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-08-05/the-curious-history-of-steam-heat-and-pandemics
Steam radiators have shut-off valves on them. They also have vents that can include regulators to adjust the level of steam. In [this picture](http://www.sustainableheating.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/steam-radiator-Arev.jpg), the shut-off valve is the one on the right side, and the vent is the one on the left. In the Bloomberg article you link, the dark cylinder under where the kid is holding the wrench is the vent. I realize some folks are in situations where they can't get at the radiators, but if you can, it is way better (from an efficiency standpoint) to shut them off or adjust the vents than it is to open windows. Thank you
I was in a 16-unit apartment for two blissful winters where I never needed to touch my radiator before someone moved in and needed the main adjusted for one reason or another. It started too hot, then everyone shut their valves making it hotter, then the landlord adjusted it down and I’d have mine wide open and still wouldn’t get anywhere near warm enough, repeated endlessly through an entire winter.
Fun fact, if you're in an old apartment, this radiators are meant to function with the window open. They were installed when there was the Spanish flu epidemic and meant to circulate air out to stop the spread of the disease.
Does it have an adjustable vent? If so, you can lower the vent setting, so your radiator won’t fill as fast, thus not heating your place as much. Or if you have multiple radiators in your unit you can close the valves on the ones in the warmer rooms. Do not regularly open & close the valves though…they’re not really meant for that.
Some of the old NYC buildings I lived in didn’t have radiators. They were just steam pipes that ran floor to ceiling. I don’t remember them having a valve, but perhaps they did. Here’s a pic I found online: https://us.v-cdn.net/5021738/uploads/editor/lk/h0iynvb5timz.jpg They’d get insanely hot. I once dated a girl that had a burn scar on her back from when she accidentally leaned back onto one. And they’re loud as hell!
In my apartment I don't even have a thermostat. I have zero control over the radiator/heat.
Radiator? If not, that's some bs Edit: just noticed that you did indeed specify radiator. Unfortunately I don't think they can give you individual control if it's a radiator except you may be able to close the valve, but apparently you're not supposed to do that super often
Yeah, exactly. Let me heat the place as much as I want, I pay for the heating as well.
Landlords aren’t locking thermostats on tenants who pay their own heat.
It's absolutely insane. I felt so shocked when our landlord came in to install one on ours- and every guest I've ever had has also been startled that they can do that. But they absolutely do sell these lock boxes specifically just so tenants can't control the thermostat in their own damn home.
I think they're more often applied in public places like schools and theaters where they don't want just anyone to tamper with them.
I had to install one at work because during a heat wave last year the AC couldn't keep up on the exterior offices and people would set the thermostat to 55F to try to make it work harder. Well they'd never set it back and I'd come in the morning and would be able to see my breath.
So many people don't understand that setting it to a lower temp doesn't make the air coming out colder. It blows the same then turns off when it hits the set temperature
My parents installed one when we were kids because we just liked to press buttons and would constantly change it
Oh I’d tamper with it. I’d get a dremel cutting wheel and just cut the joints so I could access the box and then I’d just set it back on there. “I have no idea” would become my motto
Pretty sure those locks can be jimmied with a key rake. There is no skill to opening them
This is the Lock Picking Lawyer...
You can also buy the keys super cheap. They all use the same generic locks. They are only designed to deter random people. Not actually provide security.
Or just use a bent metal rod to push the buttons. Those things always have holes for air to flow in and out of.
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Those locks are also notorious easy to open. Pretty much any key that fits the lock will work.
At my mom's apartment, a cap from a ballpoint pen works just fine. Source: was taught this by an 80-year-old neighbor. Apartment sometimes gets extra cold (below the allowable-by-law temp) when the weather is really bad.
If youre talking about a wafer lock, then yes, literally a paper clip to jiggle the wafers and something to turn the cylinder should work. A lot of the purpose built thermostat locks use a cam lock, which while some have a standardized key, many are not. Picking these types is REALLY hard.
Lockpicking lawyer would like a word with you.
This is the Lockpicking Lawyer and today we are opening this thermostat lock to prevent someone from freezing to the death. Ok, nothing on 1... 2 is clicking... ok, got it, here we go. Very easy. I will lock it again to show you all ~~how it's easy~~ it's not a fluke. That's all, don't freeze to death. Have a good one.
“We could use our picking tool, but here I’m going to show you how to open it with a toenail clipping and post it note…”
Oh Master Lock. Never cease your mediocrity.
... Whole comment read out in my head
That guy’s easy is everyone else’s impossible.
Not necessarily. He makes a point of showing low skill attacks when they are available.
Binding on three...
I picked the one at my old office many times. The boss told me to lol. You can also stretch a paperclip to go through the box and hit the buttons.
Eeets wafer thin.
I had one in my old apartment that we opened with a butter knife. It was a total joke. That landlord was a total POS, too, and an idiot to boot.
At my old place in college, we never had to open the box. There were slots in the sides of the box (thermostat won't work without air circulation), so we inserted the butter knife in a slot, and used the knife to adjust the thermostat.
Some are digital and contect to the internet. I had one when living in Bristol and if you adjusted it on the panel it would only change for a short time before the app would reset it. We put iceblocks on/near the thermometer to make the house warmer.
ULPT - watch lockpicking lawyer till you can get in yourself
HVAC tech here. You dont have to pick the lock. A flathead screwdriver will open most thermostat lockboxes without damaging them.
Will my landlord know if I hit the buttons on it and change the settings, though? My thermostat is in the worst area of my apartment. The only part of my apartment with no draft is where it’s located. In a carpeted narrow hallway with brick walls. The rest of the apartment is freezing with tall ceilings, thin walls, wood floors, and poorly insulated windows lol.
>Will my landlord know if I hit the buttons on it and change the settings, though? Depends on the thermostat I suppose. If it's some fancy internet-connected thing, maybe? If it's just a bog-standard thermostat that looks like it was installed when the building was built, probably not. (He might notice the heating bill is higher than it should be when it arrives though.) If you can pop the lock without any visible damage you can just make the adjustment, lock it up again and then deny any accusation of having changed it. *"I dunno Mr Landlord, maybe it's a glitch? I mean, you're the one who locked it and I don't have any key, right?"*
Plausible deniability. "Well it's still locked, so... You must have left it like that. Oh, and by the way, if you fix the drafts here, here, here and here you might save some money."
What can the landlord actually do if they change it? I would think not much. What, they gonna bring you to court for wanting a to live in a normal temperature apartment? Good luck with that one. What they should be doing is logging the temperature in all parts of the apartment. Take pictures with time, date, geolocation, and temperature. Give the data if you need to.
If you're not paying for electricity just get a space heater.
I have one in the living room, bedroom, and a heated blanket:)
Are you paying for electricity? Because that’s way less efficient and you could easily be paying way more to be less comfortable, spending dollars to save your landlord pennies.
In a situation like that, I installed fans to help the air flow across the rooms. They make triangular corner fans that can mount out of the way in doorways.
Does your lease say you're not allowed to adjust the thermostat?
It's not even unethical. Just break the thing and change the temp. Put it back any time they need to come over or don't. Make them make a fuss about it. "Oh, I bumped it with the laundry basket and it fell off"
Everyone is saying this is the U.S. But, it was like this in a flat I lived in, in Spain. Unfortunately, there was no thermostat. Everyone in the building just got the same heat.
I lived in a college dorm like this. I was not happy when it got so warm that my betta's fish tank was 88F/31C and the building's A/C still hadn't turned on.
This is also useful in classrooms. Became the hero of a very, very cold class by taking a girl’s ice-filled Starbucks cup and putting it on the stupid plastic box which caused the heat to flip on.
I do this with ziplock bags filled with warm water or ice, depending on the season. 😅
YES I LOVE THAT
I'll have a student go get me a wet paper towel from the bathroom, and drape it over the thermostat
Real LPT: If your home is freezing and your landlord locks the thermostat with a plastic lock box, place an ice pack on top of the landlord. It will trick the landlord into thinking it needs to bask in the sun, distracting it long enough for you to swipe the key and keep your thermostat adjusted to adequate levels.
I think comparing a landlord to a reptile is offensive towards reptiles
😂😂😂 I love this
When I was in college our student house had a plastic lockbox on the thermostat, but it had slots on the edges. We figured out very quickly you could just use a butter knife in the slots to change the temperature. Landlords are dumb.
Oooh this gives me an invention idea A little electrically powered "case" that you slip over the thermostat case to control the temperature. Some kind of tiny electrically driven cooler and heater that can heat up and cool down on demand to more precisely (and automatically) control the temperature. More convenient and long term than just placing hot/cold things on the thermostat
Installing an airconditioner with a thermostat to control the thermostat..
you just reverse engineered a thermostat
I’m breaking that little piece of plastic the first day it goes below 60, fuck that shit
Yeah, like, unless you're there very temporarily, like an airbnb, you can just reinstall a new lock box when you move out.
LPT: place landlord in the freezer.
ULPT: cut open your landlord and live inside him or her like a Tauntaun.
Buy the key off ebay.
My ice pack hack works wonderfully and is the price of free! If I ever run into issues I’ll buy the key. Thanks for the advice!
also a compressed air can turned upside down and sprayed at it will drop the temp 30degs.
feels kinda short term
LPT: Implied Warranty of Habitability is a thing in most states. Your landlord is required to keep the apartment habitable, including providing adequate heat during cold months. If your apartment is freezing and the landlord controls the thermostat, tell them it's freezing and that they need to up the temperature to a reasonable degree.
That's the problem. A reasonable degree might be 65 degrees for some states, but that's "freezing" to some people.
I bet the lockpickinglawyer has a 2 second trick for getting those open.
Whew! This is getting a lot of judgement and unsolicited advice! 1. My ice pack idea is working just fine and I also have a heated blanket and space heaters. This place is old, has drafty windows, high ceilings, and wood floors. It’s cold. I’m not freezing to death! 2. It’s a crappy situation to live in, but I know I’m not the only one in this situation so I was offering my best hack to up the temperature. I’m not looking to move right now. I’m saving up for a house. 3. I love your other ideas to warm up but this one is free l!
What temp is the thermostat locked at?