Apartment building’s thermostat located in unheated common area is cooking the tenants

heatingthermostat

In my apartment building, we have a steam heat system with radiators in each of the six apartments. The thermostat is located in the stairway/common area, where there is no radiator or exposed heat pipes of any sort. Very bad design to say the least …

What has been happening since it has been getting cold outside is that the common area is at a temperature which triggers the heater to turn on. This pumps heat into the apartments until they are a sweltering 90+ degrees F. It is horrendous waking up at 2am covered in sweat. Any ideas on how this heating problem can be fixed? Install a radiator near the thermostat? Install more thermostats (in the apartments)? HELP!

UPDATE
We are going to take it step by step to try and handle the problem. So far, we've had a newer digital thermostat installed. It hasn't been sweltering, instead it has been too cold! When the technician came, he mentioned that the way the heat in the building was installed was pretty amazing, bad amazing. Over the next few weeks we'll tweak the thermostat slightly to see if that helps. We'll also have a professional come and check out the individual radiators in the building.

Best Answer

I am assuming you own the building and can make these changes, but depending on the amount of money you want to spend:

  • Turn down the temperature on the thermostat
  • Move the thermostat to one of the apartments, probably in a locked box so the tenants can't actually control it, but it at least reflects the real temperature. You can also get thermostats with remote temperature sensors, in which case you could install the sensor in the apartment
  • Install a radiator in the common area, so it at least somewhat reflects the temperature of the apartments
  • Install a multi-zone system, with a thermostat in each apartment and independent solenoids that control heat to each apartment. This is obviously the most invasive and costly option, but would put individual control to each apartment and possibly reduce your overall heating costs. Using programmable thermostats would also help, as it could lower the temperature at night and possibly during the day while no one is home. The only problem with this is you can probably only do it with individual tenant control, and if the tenant is not paying for the heating costs they don't really have any incentive to lower the temp at any point (unless they like it colder at night).
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