Bills-included lets are easier to market and harder to budget. You quote a rent that absorbs the energy, then spend the winter hoping nobody leaves a window open in January. Landlord heating controls are what turn that open-ended exposure into something you can actually forecast.
Short answer: In a bills-included let the landlord carries the heating cost but the tenant holds the thermostat. Landlord heating controls close that gap: a schedule, a sensible upper limit and per-room visibility keep the property warm and the cost predictable, without leaving anyone cold.
In a standard let, the tenant pays for the heat they use, so there is a natural brake on consumption. Bills-included removes that brake entirely. The marginal cost of turning the heating up, or of leaving it on while out, is zero for the person making the decision.
This is not a moral failing on the tenant’s part; it is what any rational person does when a resource is free at the point of use. The answer is not to lecture tenants or to lock the thermostat. It is to build the brake into the system, so the property runs sensibly by default and nobody has to think about it.
The exposure is worth quantifying. The gap between a property run well and the same property run badly across a cold winter is not marginal, and in a portfolio it compounds across every unit at once.
Which one suits you depends on the heating system you already have. Our guide to choosing a smart thermostat for landlords goes through that in detail.
The part landlords underrate is visibility. Without per-room data you are working from a single bill at the end of the quarter, which tells you the total but nothing about the cause.
Room-level temperature history changes that. You can see that one bedroom has been sitting at 24°C since October, that a bathroom radiator has been running with a window open every morning, or that a room registered as occupied has been empty for six weeks. Each of those is a specific, fixable cost rather than a vague sense that the bills are too high.
It also tells you when a property is underperforming for reasons that have nothing to do with tenant behaviour: a room that never reaches its target may have a failing radiator, a blocked system or an insulation problem worth investigating.
The how it works page explains what the system records, and smart heating and hot water controls covers the hot water side, which is often the forgotten half of the bill.
Every bills-included landlord eventually has a conversation about consumption. Without data it is an accusation, and it goes badly. With data it is a conversation about a specific pattern on specific dates, which is much easier for everyone.
In our experience the conversation is usually unnecessary once controls are in place, because the settings have already removed the behaviour that would have prompted it. The value of the record is mostly the other way round: when a tenant reports that a room is cold, you can check whether it actually was before sending anyone out.
The same approach applies to a shared house, where HMO heating controls deal with the per room problem directly.
What are landlord heating controls?
They are heating controls configured and managed by the landlord rather than the occupant: schedules, upper and lower temperature limits, setback for empty rooms, and remote monitoring, usually with local tenant adjustment inside the range you set.
Are heating controls worth it for a bills-included let?
That is where they make the most difference, because the landlord carries the cost of every decision the tenant makes. The saving depends on how the property was being run beforehand, and the visibility often matters as much as the reduction.
Will tenants object to landlord-controlled heating?
Rarely, provided they keep local control within a sensible band and know about it at the start of the tenancy. Objections tend to come from locked or removed thermostats rather than from limits.
Can I manage heating across several rental properties at once?
Yes. A single dashboard covering every property lets you apply the same standard everywhere and change settings remotely, which usually matters more than the per-property saving once you are running more than a handful.
If your rents include bills and your winter costs are unpredictable, we can look at how your properties are currently running and what a sensible set of limits would save.
