Do you have kids or family that lives with you? Maybe you are sharing a home and the heating bills are too high. Maybe you are renting a home for income and you need to place limits on how hot and cold your guests can make it while you’re away.
Whatever the reason simply telling people to not adjust the thermostat settings is never enough.
A friend of ours asks about this problem because he has a teenage child that is his girlfriends little brother who lives with them. Telling them over and over to respect the thermostat just does not work and their heating bill is simply too expensive.
Well they are lucky that there are ways to fix this problem and it doesn’t necessarily mean throwing the kid out in the street.
Range Limited Tamper Proof Thermostats
There are a variety of different options when you are looking at a range limited thermostat but the basic method of use is that they are limited to work between specific settings such as 68f and 72f and if someone turns the temperature up to 72f it will automatically reset back to 68f in 3 hours.
This allows someone a bit of more heat in the winter but the thermostat will reset every 3 hours.
Resetting back to 68f is also good if people leave the home and don’t turn down the heater.
The actual ranges can be hard coded by the manufacturer so even tampering with the device won’t allow a change outside of that range or in homes where you somewhat trust the person living there other units will allow you to manually set the range that meets your needs.
These units also work for air conditioning and a separate range is set for cooling. Normally the lowest it will allow someone to set the unit is 76F and then it will reset in three hours just like when it is used for heating.
Final Note
There are many reasons you might want to use one of these thermostats. The first would be to control your energy use when you have people that don’t care about how much things cost. Other reasons might be to return heating and cooling levels to safe levels if the home is occupied by a senior that might have trouble using the thermostat on their own.
Whatever your reason its good to understand that if these units are installed in places that you rent out to the general public then people will try to tamper with them. They will normally brake them just to cause problems. Unfortunately there is not much you can do about that.
Contact your HVAC technician and ask if they have any other options such as a thermostat free of all adjustments that only has a temperature reading and not setting ability.