Families often go to counseling to unpack and resolve significant conflicts and traumas, but I think I need to book a family therapy session for my parents, my siblings, and I because we’re constantly fighting over the thermostat! It’s ridiculous.
My parents are very conscious of our energy consumption and our heating and cooling bill, so they’re always adjusting the thermostat to as close to the outside temperature as we can handle.
This irritates my sister, an athlete who is almost always working out; when she’s not at practice, she’s in the garage running on the treadmill, or doing calisthenics in her bedroom. Needless to say, she’s always hot, so she cranks the thermostat down to absolutely frigid temperatures. I play a lot of video games and, although they can make me work up a sweat, I’m ultimately pretty sedentary. As soon as I start to feel the chill that my sister produces with her insane thermostat settings, I turn it up to a more reasonable temperature. Between all of our individual heating and cooling preferences, we can never agree on a constant temperature in the house. To my sister, my parents and I keep it too hot; to me and my parents, my sister keeps it too cold; to my parents, both my sister and I keep it way too cold, and we run up their electric bill. An HVAC technician recently suggested that we install a new HVAC system with zoning capabilities; zoning would allow us to each control the temperature in our own spaces, keeping us comfortable and keeping the fights to a minimum. My parents are still considering the cost, but my sister and I both said that we’d give up our college funds just to stay comfortable in our own home. Needless to say, my family is ready for a truce!