Decades ago, once air conditioning became an easily accessible thing, hotel air conditioners were easy and pretty similar across the board – they were typically either a window unit in a cheap place, or an under-the-window unit in a fancy shmancy hotel.
Hotel Air Conditioning: Then vs. Now
Fast forward a few decades, and times have changed. Window units in the cheaper places disappeared in favor of under-the-window air conditioners. Meanwhile, more expensive hotels began introducing thermostats for their guests to use to control the temperature of their rooms.
Of course, those thermostats started becoming more technologically advanced over the years, as well. In an effort to “save energy” (I’m sure their heating and air conditioning costs had NOTHING to do with it), some hotels required you to use your room key card to be in a slot for the air conditioning to work.
The Rise (and Fall) of Energy-Saving Thermostats
Fortunately, many hoteliers eventually discovered that most of us were smarter than that, and slowly but surely, those stupid things are being replaced with more advanced electronic thermostats.
Of course, those “more advanced electronic thermostats” have their own issues – nowadays, the hotelier often can set the minimum and maximum temperature. So you may set the room to be 68 degrees, but it might never go below 73 degrees because that’s how the hotel management wants it.
That being said, hotel guests are smarter than that too, and there are usually hacks to bypass these settings. We have a whole list of those hacks to override thermostat settings, organized in alphabetical order by thermostat name, and we keep updating it as we discover more – so bookmark this link!
When Thermostat Hacks Don’t Work
Sometimes though, there are electronic thermostats that are impossible to hack (we’ve marked those in our list). And unless you’ve visited that particular hotel before, you never know when you’ll come across one of those horrible things and may have to revert to other hacks.
But then you occasionally find THE BEST electronic thermostat out there. We discovered one of those during a recent trip to New York.
Our Surprising Experience in New York
We tried our luck with a relatively new Kimpton that wasn’t far from Times Square. You can read our review of the hotel at this link. One thing we didn’t mention in the review was the thermostat. It was a Verdant, and I KNEW we had hacks for a few different sub-brands of Verdant…so I was ready.
The room was relatively comfortable when we got in. Other than noticing what brand of thermostat it was, we didn’t go any further with it; there was no need.
We do like the room to be a little chillier when we’re sleeping, so after we got back to the room that night, I went to reset the thermostat (and get a better look at what kind it was, assuming I’d have to do something to it to make the room the temperature we wanted, instead of what the hotelier wanted). This is what it looked like:
It’s hard to tell in the picture, but the thermostat is, well, dead as a doornail. I pressed every button on it, and nothing lit up. No numbers showed, and nothing.
That was probably the first time I noticed that the hotel room had an old-fashioned under-the-window heating/air conditioning unit.
It’s been my experience that, not only are those units a solid workhorse, they also (at least so far) can’t be remotely controlled by the management like a thermostat can. So I opened the panel and set it exactly how we wanted it.
And we were done.
Why This Was the Best Thermostat Ever
So yeah…this was easily THE BEST thermostat I’ve ever come across, simply because it didn’t work, AT ALL, and we got to keep the room as we wanted, with one of those lower tech units.
Winning! 😉
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2 comments
Because Sharon you can reach it without a laddder? 😉
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