A heated argument that cooled down.
"WHOOOOO... TOUUUUCHED... MEEEE... THERMOSTAAAAAAT?!"
— Mr. Krabs, SpongeBob SquarePants, "Krabs à la Mode"
Domestic comedies often have a character who likes to leave the house's thermostat at a specific temperature, whether it be because of personal preference or a desire to save money by keeping the heat down. Naturally, this often leads them to react poorly whenever someone attempts to change the temperature (usually trying to make a cold room warmer). Several comedies exaggerate the degree of their reaction, including taking notice the second a change is made or getting disproportionately angry over a single-digit increase.
This trope is often associated with fathers (or parents in general), though it can extend beyond families or even living spaces. A rich person who throws tantrums about changing the thermostat is likely The Scrooge, and if not they are Cutting Corners. One of the two might just be a Thermal Dissident. Or perhaps they are an environmentalist type with some justifiable concerns about how much energy it wastes to heat the building. The person who wants to change the thermostat obviously has Thermal Dissonance with the miser. And of course, it's pretty much guaranteed to be a point of contention with an Odd Couple.
This trope often comes into play to easily highlight a character's alignment to the Four-Temperament Ensemble.
Examples:
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Advertising
- A famous "This is Sports Center'' commercial
centers around the Pittsburgh Penguins mascot Iceburgh and the New Jersey Devils mascot N.J. Devil adjusting the ESPN office thermostat to their preferred temperature.
Anime & Manga
- New Game!: Rin gets pissed off and forbids Ko, Hajime, and Yun from ever touching the thermostat again after the three of them adjust the temperature up and down in rapid succession because they refused to discuss and agree on a temperature.
- Yotsuba&!: After her new neighbor Fuuka explains the concept of "glowball warming," Yotsuba is outraged to discover that her dad is running multiple air conditioners in their apartment. She tearfully declares him "the enemy of the earth," much to his complete bafflement.
Comic Books
- The Man: John's father is furious when the title character turns up the thermostat. Lampshaded by John saying "I hope Dad doesn't notice".
- In Giant Days the girls discover that Daisy's girlfriend Ingrid has been cranking up the thermostat whenever she's home alone, when she leaves them with the most astonishing gas and electric bill Esther has ever seen. And she's probably seen six or seven!
Comic Strips
- Calvin and Hobbes: Calvin is constantly forbidden from turning up the thermostat during the winter, with his parents insisting that he just wear extra layers of clothes if he's that cold. Or if they're really fed up with him, they'll toss him outside into the snow for a while so he can "properly appreciate how nice and warm the house is."
- Dilbert: One one-shot character is Flashy, who swings randomly between feeling too hot and feeling too cold, and occupies the cubicle next to the thermostat. Cue the arguments with the other office workers.
- FoxTrot: It's a Running Gag that Andy, the mother of the Fox family, keeps the thermostat lower than her children would like it and refuses to turn it up. Things that have happened because of her refusal to turn the heat on include a fresh cup of coffee flash freezing, snowmen being setup at the kitchen table and not melting, the computer literally freezing solid, and the kids going outside in the winter to warm up.
- Mr. Potato Head: One strip has the kids complain that they're cold because of the thermostat being set so low, only for the title character to say Misery Builds Character. When Mrs potato head complains about how cold it is, he suggests turning it up.
Literature
- A Christmas Carol: While set before thermostats existed, Scrooge still managed to be a temperature tyrant before his time.
Scrooge had a very small fire, but the clerk's fire was so very much smaller that it looked like one coal. But he couldn't replenish it, for Scrooge kept the coal-box in his own room; and so surely as the clerk came in with the shovel, the master predicted that it would be necessary for them to part.
Live-Action TV
- The Big Bang Theory:
- There is running tension between Sheldon and Leonard over their apartment's thermostat—Sheldon will not alter it from his optimum level under any circumstances and awards a strike against Leonard when he alters the settings.
- In the episode "The Jiminy Conjecture", while trying to figure out if a cricket in their apartment is a new species or not, such a tumultuous thermal tamper turf dispute is hinted at.
Raj: What's that?
Howard: Sounds like a cricket.
Sheldon: Hang on. Based on the number of chirps per minute and the ambient temperature in this room, it is a snowy tree cricket.
Howard: Oh, give me a frickin' break. How could you possibly know that?
Sheldon: In 1890, Emile Dolbear determined that there was a fixed relationship between the number of chirps per minute of the snowy tree cricket and the ambient temperature. A precise relationship that is not present with ordinary field crickets.
Raj: How do you know what the exact temperature of the room is?
Sheldon: Under the terms of my roommate agreement with Leonard, I've had unilateral control of the thermostat ever since the sweaty night of '06.
- Cheers: Rebecca interrupts a word association experiment Frasier is conducting on Woody to complain about the thermostat being adjusted again. Her complaint seems to be justified as she points out the thermostat is in a really awkward place: at a low point on the wall by the smoking section, meaning she has to bend forward to fix it. This is just after we find out that Woody associates "thermostat" with "bottom" (as in Rebecca's).
- Corner Gas: In "Two Degrees of Separation", Oscar and Emma get a new digital thermostat, and having an actual number on display rather than a more ambiguous dial causes them to debate what is considered room temperature. Oscar thinks room temperature is 70 °F, and setting it any higher causes him to act like he's about to die of heat stroke. Emma thinks room temperature is 72, and setting it any lower causes her to act like she's about to die of hypothermia. On Lacey's suggestion, they resolve the issue by switching the thermostat display to 20 °C because neither of them knew the exact conversion.
Oscar: You've taken the metric system and used it for good!
- Star Trek: The Next Generation: In the episode "Genesis", after the crew's exposure to an unusual virus that slowly alters and de-evolves those infected—Deanna Troi as acting captain on watch, while experiencing the first symptoms and feeling cold, keeps asking the computer to increase the temperature (and humidity) on the bridge, to the visible discomfort of all other crew mates. Worf steps in and resets it to normal, asking Troi to seek a medical evaluation.
Video Games
- Hitman 2: Robert Knox suffered injuries at his face which deprived him of the ability to hydrate his eyes; due to this, he has to maintain a damp atmosphere in his offices. It can even be used to kill him: first, modify the AC to make the air dryer and then he will go to the bathroom to take his eye drops, which 47 can poison beforehand.
Web Videos
- Dad: In "Dad Loves You", it's claimed he'll never run out of love...even if you keep touching the thermostat.
The thought alone kills me
All that money out the window
Western Animation
- American Dad!: In "Salute Your Sllort", upon learning that Klaus adjusted the thermostat in the middle of the night, the family reacts as if they just discovered he was a cheating spouse, with Francine and Roger running out of the room crying and Stan cancelling a family trip because they can't trust him alone in the house anymore.
- Codename: Kids Next Door: In "Operation: H.O.T.S.T.U.F.F.", Numbuh 3's father scolds her for trying to touch the thermostat, even if it is unbearably cold (for her, anyways). The plot kickstarts when Numbuh 3 set it to such extreme heat that it could erupt like a literal volcano, which the team has to enter to prevent it. Meanwhile, when Numbuh 4 stays behind to watch Numbuh 3's father, he found the thermostat at the treehouse, setting the temperature so low that the tree became an ice cube.
- Family Guy: The very first episode has a scene where Meg attempts to turn up the thermostat, only for her father Peter to abruptly burst into the room and demand to know who touched it. He claims that every father has a brain implant that goes off when their kids change the temperature, leading to a gag where several other dads in the neighborhood show up at the door to check the situation.
- Futurama: In "The Farnsworth Parabox" Farnsworth-1 and Farnsworth-A alternate turning up and down the "Chandelier-o-stat", a giant hex nut on the wall with an equally-giant wrench, turning the lights up and down.
Farnsworth-1: Well, that was pointless.
- In one of the Treehouse of Terror episodes of The Simpsons, Homer misunderstands the note left on the Springfield Elementary School thermostat reading "Do Not Touch - Willy" as "Do not touch Willy" and cranks it all the way up. The sudden change in level causes the furnace to belch out flames, killing Groundskeeper Willy and turning him into an expy of Freddy Krueger.
- The SpongeBob SquarePants episode "Krabs à la Mode" centers on Mr. Krabs' refusal to let the Krusty Krab's thermostat go beyond 62 degrees (Fahrenheit) because "heat costs money!" This inspires Plankton to try to ruin the restaurant's business by turning it down to freezing temperature, then covering the temperature indicator to make Mr. Krabs think it's still at 62.
Mr. Krabs: There's two ways to get on me bad side, boys: I don't like kids playing in me yard, and nobody but me touches me thermostat!
- The Wild Thornberrys: Played for drama with a bit of justification—in one episode, the family is in Africa during the hot season. Debbie wants to turn the A/C up to the max, but Marianne tells her no, until she decides to relent under the condition that it's not set past eight (out of ten) because it uses a lot of energy. Sure enough, when Debbie is by herself she does just that and takes a nap... causing the Comvee's batteries to run dry.
Real Life
- This is a common point of contention in professional office buildings where men who wear full business suits are naturally going to be more comfortable in cold temperatures, and uncomfortable in warm temperatures, than their female colleagues whose attire is a skirt or dress.
- It's not unheard of for some commercial buildings to install a fake thermostat in public spaces, so folks who want to fight over the temperature can fiddle with it to their heart's content while the actual thermostat is secured away in the maintenance room somewhere. There are some studies that suggest the illusion of control is enough to make people actually feel more comfortable, as a form of the Placebo Effect.
- This can be justifiable in areas such as recreational vehicles and boats—since it runs off of the same thing as the vehicle does.
[22°C / 71.6°F] <— if that reading changes, things are going to get mighty crispy indeed!
