In Germany, from what I understand, when the temperature in apartment falls below a tolerable amount, then the renter can request the landlord for a rent reduction.
This happend to me, and I got a thermo meter, and it showed below the expected temperature. When I went to escalate with the landlord, she told my thermometer is giving wrong values.
Now, what do I do? How could I possibly escalate this?
This may seem familiar, I have quoted it before:
Quoting § 535 BGB:
§ 535 Inhalt und Hauptpflichten des Mietvertrags
(1) Durch den Mietvertrag wird der Vermieter verpflichtet, dem Mieter den Gebrauch der Mietsache während der Mietzeit zu gewähren. Der Vermieter hat die Mietsache dem Mieter in einem zum vertragsgemäßen Gebrauch geeigneten Zustand zu überlassen und sie während der Mietzeit in diesem Zustand zu erhalten.
Translation:
§ Section 535 Content and main obligations of the tenancy agreement
(1) The rental agreement obliges the landlord to grant the tenant the use of the rented property during the rental period. The landlord must leave the rented property to the tenant in a condition suitable for use in accordance with the contract and maintain it in this condition during the rental period.
The landlord is responsible for the proper functioning of the Thermostat just as much as for the rest of the heating.
If it doesn't work and that is the reason your apartment is falling below the said temperature for multiple days in a row, you can lower the rent.
Please note that to lower the rent, it must be broken in a way that makes it impossible for you to heat up the rooms using the heating system. So for example if you could heat your rooms to 20° if you set it to 25°, that is still technically broken and surely inconvenient, but not a reason to reduce rent.
When I went to escalate with the landlord, she told my thermometer is giving wrong values.
That seems borderline stupid. The minimum temperature your landlord has to guarantee is 18°C, your heating should easily be able to give you 23-25°C if you put it that way. No thermometer is off or could be read wrong by 7°C. A thermometer that wrong could not differentiate between a life threatening hypothermia and life threatening fever.
I suggest you ask them over and offer them the ability to bring their own thermometer if they don't believe you.
Thermostats are nasty and sometimes not easy to handle. Especially elderly people often have problems adjusting them correctly since they became all touchscreen technological marvels, when back in the day they were a box with a single hardware knob. Last time, the service technician did not set the timezone correctly, and my neighbor had to wake up to their freezing nighttime settings every morning until I fixed it. How do you explain UTC and timezones to someone who wants to turn on their heating that is definetely not travelling across timezones any time soon?
If your themostat doesn't work, ask your landlord to call a service technician if they cannot fix the problem themselves. That is their obligation.
I would argue that, at the moment, the landlord might be correct. So, before doing anything else, I'd gather more data. Buy a couple of extra thermometers, of different makes. They should be within a couple of degrees of each other.
You've then got a reasonable consensus measurement. Next, you want to get more data, using all three thermometers. You're aiming to show a sustained decrease below the permitted temperature. I would record video while taking the measurements, to show you've not just opened all the windows, or something, and take measurements 3x a day for a couple of days. Measure in all the rooms, allow thermometers to acclimatise to each room before reading, and make sure to include the radiator settings in the video each time.
The nice thing here is that it might also help figure out what is wrong - a radiator in one of the rooms might not be working, in which case, bleeding it might fix it.
If there's nothing obvious, but the heating still can't get up to a reasonable temperature, you've got a vastly improved case for taking action - not just a couple of measurements with a possibly accurate thermometer.
At that point, I'd start discussing how they can either fix it or start losing rent.
All scientific instruments (including thermometers) have varying degrees of accuracy and precision:
Both are sources of inaccuracy in measurement. Calibration can reduce inaccuracy, but precision is a function of the instrument itself and its operating conditions.
You don’t tell us what sort of thermometer you are using but if it is a cheap alcohol filled tube that you might buy in a souvenir store, it has probably never been calibrated and might be out by several degrees. If it’s a reasonable electronic one such as you might buy in a hardware store, errors are likely to be in the order of a degree or so providing it’s new or recently calibrated. If it’s a high precision laboratory instrument with recent calibration errors could be less than a tenth of a degree. Consult the literature that came with the instrument, it will tell you all about its accuracy and precision. If it didn’t come with literature, you might as well not bother.
In addition, how you measure the temperature is also going to matter. You should be measuring in several positions in the room and be using the median temperature. You need to be away from walls, doors, and windows and out of drafts. You also need to repeat the measurements in the same places at the same time over several days.
If you present this kind of robust data, it will be very hard for anyone to argue against it. As the person asserting the fact (it’s too cold), the onus rests on the tenant to prove it.
I am no expert in law, but I do know that precisely calibrated thermometers are a lot more affordable these days than they used to be.
For example, I have this one from switchbot which advertises ±0.2°C accuracy - and the manufacturers of the sensing chip offer calibration certificates to that effect. The range of temperatures people find comfortable is fairly narrow, so you want to know the measurement is right.
My country does not have the same rental protections as Germany has - but when I lived in a rental property with faulty heating and the landlord was unresponsive to my complaints, I brought myself a cheap fan heater which I ran as needed. This kept me warm, and was within my rights as a tenant.
