The thermostat in your hotel room is probably a FAKE
Many hotels control the heating in rooms themselves to cut costs, reduce maintenance problems and meet energy targets
If the heating in your hotel room is too high, do you fiddle with the thermostat to try and lower the temperature?
Turns out, you could be wasting your time.
A report by the has revealed that many of those thermostats can't be controlled by hand.
Instead, the heating is monitored by a central system and those dials and buttons on a plastic box next to your bedroom door are just for show.
According to the study, many large hotel chains like to monitor the heating themselves in order to cut costs, reduce maintenance problems and meet energy targets.
If a person wants their room particularly cold, it risks freezing up the air conditioning system which will lead to costly maintenance fees, so they prefer to give the illusion that the guest is changing the temperature instead.
Seasoned travellers have taken to bringing portable thermometers with them while on a trip, and discovering that a hotel room is often several degrees higher than the room thermostat claimed.
Nowadays, the temperature is often controlled by a system of heat and motion monitors, which tells when a person is inside the room.
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For example, the thermostat might switch off as soon as a guest removes the room card from the slot by the door, before vacating the room.
Equally, the system could go to sleep if the person has stopped moving around in the room for a considerable amount of time, like when the guest is in bed, which means it can get hot and stuffy while they're sleeping.
In this instance, a frantic wave of the arm while still lying down is often all it takes to get the air conditioning working again.
The popularity for centrally-monitored thermostats in big companies has been happening for a while.
In 2003, the Air Conditioning, Heating and Refrigeration News asked readers if they had ever installed “dummy thermostats” in office spaces.
Of the 70 who responded to the survey, 51 said they had, stating that people felt better that they could control the temperature in their work space after a non-functioning thermostat was installed.
But the lack of control can be a real pain when it comes to getting comfortable enough to go to sleep.
So some travellers have resorted to overriding the systems with come simple technology wizzardy.
There are several YouTube videos that show how to override many of the most popular systems in hotels, and a Tumblr page called Thermostatbypass also lists the various ways to dismantle the systems.