Dementia Proof Thermostat: What Caregivers Actually Do
Your parent with dementia won't leave the thermostat alone, but locking it feels too controlling. What other families did, and how they handled the cold.
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It's the middle of summer, the house is sweltering, and the thermostat says the heat is on. Your mother turned it up because she was cold, the same as yesterday, and she'll turn it up again as soon as you've turned it down.
That's the everyday version. The worse one belongs to the person who started a thread in r/AgingParents called "Yes, I lock the thermostat. No, it's not overly controlling."
Their dad can't remember how the thermostat works, instructions posted beside it or not, and while they were out of town he pressed buttons until he got into the settings and took the heater offline. He was without heat for a few weeks.
Fixing it meant pulling the thermostat off the wall, reconnecting wires and reconfiguring the whole system by hand.
If your parent has dementia and keeps changing the thermostat, the fix that comes up most in that community is a clear lock box. It's a plastic cover with a key that mounts on the wall around the thermostat, so the buttons stay visible and out of reach.
What the lock box fixed
The second thread, "Thermostat wars", starts on an 85-degree day. The person who wrote it had turned the AC on, noticed two hours later that the house was still hot, and found the heat back on. Their mother had done it because she was cold.
Three replies said the same thing: get the lock box, and tell her to put on a sweater.
In the first thread, somebody with a milder version of the same mother had already put one up:
I put a lockbox on her thermostat when she'd turn it either to max heat or max cold on the same day depending on if she was chilly or not. She'd leave it on max heat in august in Houston when it was 104 F outside.
u/mel_cache, in r/AgingParents
Another reply in that thread says a parent with dementia will obsess over the thermostat relentlessly, and that the box has to be done. What wore them down was the "I'm cold" with it set at 85.
The numbers stop meaning anything, which is the part a sweater can't fix. One mother didn't know whether 75 was warmer than 65. A father described by his child on an HVAC forum stands at the unit unable to tell whether turning up the AC means colder or a higher number.
With the box on, nobody has to answer that question at the wall. The buttons are still there to look at, but the furnace stays where you set it.
Is locking the thermostat controlling?
The person who started the first thread was tired of being told so by people who weren't there.
One reply came from somebody whose parent is in assisted living. The facility keeps every apartment's thermostat locked, because residents fiddle with them until the AC freezes over or the heat becomes a hazard. Maintenance adjusts on request. Their advice is to keep it locked and consider it a health and safety issue.
The person on the other side of the lock can still be angry about it. On Tech-enhanced Life, a reader wrote under an article about a parent who kept fiddling with the thermostat: "I feel horrible and he feels mad at me because I have locked the thermostat at 76."
The box protects the furnace. The complaints about being cold need an answer of their own, and the last section has what the threads offer.
Will a lock box fit your thermostat?
Measure before you order. The boxes are sold by the biggest thermostat they'll fit, and that limit varies from one listing to the next. The box here fits thermostats up to about 6.3 inches tall and 4.4 inches wide, so hold a tape to yours, height and width, and check both against the listing you've picked.
Shape doesn't come into it. Someone whose Ecobee sits inside a round plastic border was told the box doesn't care what shape the thermostat is, since it covers the whole thing. A unit that small fits most boxes, the same commenter added.
Big-box and hardware stores keep them in stock, if you'd rather not wait for a delivery.
What about a smart thermostat?
For some families it does the job. The person whose dad took the heater offline is one of them: their thermostat's display is locked and they control it from the app.
It didn't settle things for the person in the "Thermostat wars" thread, whose model is locked at 72 from the app while their mother can still turn the heat on from the panel. Theirs is a Pro1, and the panel is why they were asking about a box at all.
A smart thermostat also needs Wi-Fi, which the house of the mother who couldn't tell 75 from 65 didn't have. The writer of the Tech-enhanced Life article, Frank Engelman, couldn't find a ready-made way to lock a smart one down and built his own.
The decoy thermostat
Four people, one in "Thermostat wars" and three on the HVAC forum, suggest the same trick: lock the real one, then put a dummy thermostat somewhere prominent for your parent to adjust. One says that's what office buildings do. Another would install an old one as the dummy.
Nobody in either thread has actually done it. If you try it, you'll be the first person we've found to say whether it works.
When your parent really is cold
One reply in "Thermostat wars" asks whether the mother is complaining because she's in real discomfort. For that commenter, 72 is honestly a painful temperature, and 73 or 74 is a compromise where they're chilly but not hurting.
Their own suggestion is a cheap experiment: lock it at 74 instead of 72 for a while and see whether the complaints change.
The answer that comes up most is a heated throw on the chair. Lock the thermostat, says one reply, then put a heated throw wherever she sits, one under her and one over her, and switch them off at night.
For another family, a heated throw kept the house relatively peaceful through a winter: their dad never leaves his recliner, and they run hot themselves.
The Sunbeam throw is the plain corded kind they're describing, a fleece blanket with a controller on the lead.
Somebody whose mother had Lewy body dementia used an electric blanket as a furniture cover where she sat. It kept her warm through an Arkansas summer while the house stayed cool enough for everybody else.
Another got their mom a heated throw, and she loves it.
It didn't work in the house that started the thread. That mother won't use a heated throw, convinced it'll start a fire, and barely tolerates a heated vest.
For a parent who's cold at 85 and will sit under a blanket, the throw goes on the chair the same day the box goes on the wall. For one who won't, the box still goes up, and the sweater is what's left.
Measure the thermostat tonight, height and width, and order the lock box that says it fits. Put a heated throw on the chair while it's on its way, switched on before anybody asks.
