Damage to my a/c and heater unit

[Nicole649]

Hello all! I am not a new host but I did take a break for a few years and am now hosting in a different city than where I currently live. I have one 4 bedroom house that can be rented as a whole or separate as private bedrooms and shared spaces. Right now it’s 3 traveling nurses with a 4th about to join them. 2 of the nurses have been veeeeery high maintenance. Asking common sense questions that I’ve already answered on my listing and in the bider located in the living room. Last week on Monday I got messages from each of them that the heater stopped working. I let them know I was working on it asap. One messaged and called me over and over and over in just a couple hours. Mind you, I live a state away and have small children. So being on the phone can be a real challenge. I got a HVAC company over there, they fixed the problem and we all moved on. Well, I got another 2-3 messages AND a phone call from the same guest that did this on Monday. I told her I was working on asap (it was about 9:30am. And it’s a sunday). I explained it was difficult to find anyone on a sunday that was available. I finally got ahold of someone around 10am. They went over within the hour. Come to find out the guest(s) were flipping it a/c to heat and back so many times it tripped the breaker and caused damage to my unit. So I have within less than a week had to replace two parents that have totaled about $600 that was damage caused by guests. How do I go about handling this? Can I charge the guests for the $600? How do I know/prove which guest it was? We are installing a nest thermostat soon so I can have more information when they call me with these issues. But I’m not ok with them causing damage and just walking away like it was something I caused or did. I definitely am not willing to just sit back and take a bad review for it either. I’ll take any advice you have 

[Sarah977]

@Nicole649  As a remote host, you really need to employ a co-host who lives near your rental and who can be available to deal with any issues in person. As you have experienced, guests may be having issues because they are using something improperly and don't know how to troubleshoot. And it can be difficult, expensive, and perhaps not even necessary,  to call  around trying to find a technician who can come out quickly to fix something, especially when you aren't even sure what the problem is.

A local co-host can actually save you money- they might see that guests have too many heavy-usage appliances plugged into the same circuit, which is causing the breakers to flip off and advise the guests of what is causing the issue, before it can damage anything. Or in this case, determine that it is the constant AC/heat flipping that is at fault.

A co-host could be someone who does that for a living, another host in the area who might have time to take that on, or even a neighbor. A retired, active guy ( or gal) who is good at handyman stuff and troubleshooting might be happy to be on call for things like this to earn some extra money.

As far as your current dilemma goes, it's tricky. If no one told the guests how to deal with the AC unit, it's hard to hold them responsible. Some people just have no common sense and have never beeen homeowners themselves, only renters, sothey can be quite oblivious and hard on things- they've never had to pay  for repairs, they've just called the landlord if something isn't working.

I suppose you could discuss it with the guests, and make it clear you would appreciate and expect some compensation, but with 3 unrelated guests there, who is to blame? 

And if you push it, you will likely get a bad review, but that's not the end of the world. You can always respond to a review to clarify things for future guests, and you have plenty of good reviews, so it would be an obvious outlier. 

It's a lot of money to eat, but you also might just take it as an expensive learning experience- that you need a thermostat you can control and a boots-on-the-ground helper nearby.