Smart controls: the solution to heating woes in apartments

“My apartment doesn’t have any heat.”

Six words a property manager never wants to hear.

By the time you’re hearing this from a tenant, it probably means that the problem started at least 8 hours ago and will take another 8+ hours to correct.

Your building’s archaic, timer-based controls aren’t capable of detecting the problem. And even if they could, you’d have to be onsite in the boiler room to learn about it because they’re not connected to the internet.

So, the building’s remaining heat was used up over 8 hours, and then tenants started to notice the lack of heat coming out of their radiators and faucets.

Now they’re calling you to fix the problem immediately.

You send someone out to check the problem (this takes an hour or two), they realize they’ll need someone else to fix the problem (another couple of hours), and finally, that person fixes the problem (another hour or two, if you’re lucky).

And if this is a particularly cold day when boiler service companies are overloaded, double all of those wait times.

When your building’s problems are reported after they become major problems, you will always be way behind the eight ball.

And it's not that you’re not smart; it’s because your building's controls aren’t.

This is why tens of thousands of buildings across the US are upgrading to smart controls. These controls not only save energy and typically pay for themselves in months, but they also detect problems in seconds - before anyone notices.

In fact, in many cases, smart controls can even now dispatch your service company automatically the moment an issue is detected.

In effect, smart controls turn dreaded phone calls into proactive, helpful ones.