When I briefly lived in an apartment, there was once a day in which it was abundantly clear that the air conditioning went out. When it was obvious that no cool air was coming out of the vents, I called up the main office to see if I could get someone from maintenance over to come fix it. However, it was a Sunday, and the office hours were drastically reduced, and I was unable to actually get with a human being on the phone, and I thought that I was going to be boned until Monday.
I tried to stick it out, but didn’t last more than 30 minutes before I began looking through drawers for the information packet that was given to us when moving in, to see if there were any alternative numbers to call, or if I could get to maintenance directly or something. I found an emergency number and figured it wouldn’t hurt to call and get a human being on the line to see if they could point me in the right direction.
When I got a person to pick up, I explained my situation, and they asked me to tell them what the thermostat read. “83,” I told them, and they responded with “I’ll be right over. 82F is what we consider to be an emergency.”
In less than an hour, a maintenance guy showed up, turned out a freon recharge was all that was needed, and then the entire apartment began cooling down pretty quickly afterward.
The point of this little story is that I just read this article about what Energy Star recommended people keep their thermostats at, in order to save energy: