Limit the temperature on thermostat

[Liudmila20]

Hello hosts,

I wonder if you have any experience with setting limit to increase temperature on thermostats for guests when you rent out whole property.

my thermostat is easily accessible in the living room with temperature limit to 30degree Celsius. I am concerned that guests might put unnecessary hot temperature in the house for 24 hours and I will pay extremely high gas bill. 

I wonder these who have easily accessible thermostats in the house - what do you do when renting out whole property?

[Helen3]

30c is incredibly hot 😁

use Hive or similar and set minimum and maximum temperatures and times it is on remotely 

[Liudmila20]

Please could you let me know what hive is and where do I get it?

[Helen3]

Hive is an automated system for heating/lighting etc @Liudmila20 

If you Google Hive you will find their website.

[Liudmila20]

Thanks. Unfortunately on-site control overrides online control with hive. But Thanks for info anyway 

[Debra300]

@Helen3,

@Liudmila20 shared with me that Hive doesn't prevent manual override of the app settings so guests would be able to change Temps at the thermostat. I recommended checking out Google Nest, Ecobee and Amazon Smart Thermostat.

After chatting with I checked with the company from whom we bought our smart thermostat and find out it also allows manual temperature changes.  Fortunately, we can lock the display monitor so no changes can be made.  If that option wasn't available to us we'd have done what @Mike-And-Jane0 did and put a secured cover on the thermostat. 

[Liudmila20]

Indeed Debra, it’s only ecobee and nest can prevent temperature overriding. Also inspire, but not hive 

[Liudmila20]

I just found hive thermostat. Please could you confirm that guest won’t be able to change temperature locally once I set maximum temperature online? 

[Till-and-Jutta0]

We limit the thermostat to max 22 C. And we announce this clearly in our listing.

In Europe the times are over when guests can expect 25 C at midnight (did happen before).

We decided to go this way - other hosts are closing their listing during the winter.

Our government expects that we cut the gas consumption by 20 % - otherwise we will have a shortage later.

[Liudmila20]

I wonder how do I limit temperature on thermostat..?

[Mike-And-Jane0]

@Liudmila20 we bought lockable thermostat covers and announced in our listing that the temperature can only be adjusted by us (remotely over the internet). We took this drastic action when a guest set the heating to 30 degrees 24 hours per day!

[Chantelle50]

How do they access heating @Mike-And-Jane0 ? Or is it only set on certain times throughout the day?

[Mike-And-Jane0]

@Chantelle50 It is set for certain times of day and the temperature is also varied during these times. We set it generously (ie on all day when very cold) and to a relatively high temp of up to 22 degrees C in the evening when people tend to be siting around. We always tell people to ask if they need more or less heating as we can control from a computer anywhere in the world.

One of our specific problems was that the system was designed to be used from a computer so the controller was small and quite hard to use. Either by accident or design we used to get people setting it to heat 24hrs/day at 28+ degrees C.

One final thought. We monitored our fuel use carefully so that we knew when to order more biomass fuel as there are not many places you can get it from. As a result we noticed that the heating cost very little to run in Autumn/Spring so it didn't cost us much to heat the apartments then even though we didn't heat our house.

[Debra300]

@Liudmila20,

We installed wifi enabled thermostats which have apps that can set temperature ranges that can't be over-ridden by the device that's located in the rental.  Since our listings are across the pond, I will not make a product recommendation, but do suggest that you perform a search of the one and types that @Helen3 mentioned to read and find out the details for yourself.