Energy when the guest has no incentive to save it
The person using the energy is not the person paying for it, and they leave in three days. The strategy has to be built into the property rather than requested from the occupant.
Short-let property has an energy problem that owner-occupied property does not: the person using the energy is not the person paying for it, and they are gone in three days. There is no incentive to close a window, no reason to turn the heating down when going out, and a reasonable expectation that a holiday should not involve thinking about the thermostat.
None of that is unreasonable behaviour on the guest's part. It does mean the energy strategy has to be built into the property rather than requested from the occupant.
Where the money goes
Before changing anything, understand the shape of consumption. In most short lets it breaks down predictably.
Heating and hot water dominate, usually by a wide margin in cooler climates. Within that, the largest single waste is heating an empty property and heating a property with a window open.
Hot water is disproportionately high in short lets because guests shower more, do so at unpredictable times, and there is a turnover of towels and linen.
Cooling dominates instead in warm climates, with the same open-window problem in reverse.
Everything else — lighting, appliances, the television left on — is real but secondary, and worth addressing after the big items.
A whole-property energy meter and a fortnight of data will tell you your own split, which is worth more than any general assumption.
The interventions that work without asking anything of guests
Occupancy-linked heating
The single largest saving. Setback when the property is empty between bookings, pre-heat before arrival, and setback again after departure. Driven by the booking calendar and confirmed by a door contact or presence sensor rather than by a fixed schedule.
The refinement worth adding is within-stay setback: if the property shows no presence for several hours during a stay, reduce heating modestly and restore it when someone returns. Do this gently — a two-degree setback that recovers quickly, not a deep one — because a guest returning to a cold flat is a legitimate complaint.
Window-open detection
A contact sensor on each window, pausing heating or cooling in that room while it is open. This is the classic short-let waste and guests genuinely do not think about it. Pause rather than switch off, with a short delay on closing, so a brief airing does not cause a cold room.
Worth pairing with a friendly note in the property rather than an accusatory one: something explaining that the heating pauses automatically when a window is open, which turns a control measure into a feature.
Hot water scheduling
Where the property has a cylinder, heat it to schedule rather than continuously, and hold a lower temperature when empty. Keep the weekly high-temperature cycle that controls bacterial growth — that is a safety measure, not an efficiency one, and it should never be removed to save energy.
Setting sensible limits rather than fixed values
Guests should be able to adjust the temperature; that is part of a comfortable stay. What is reasonable is a range — say sixteen to twenty-three degrees — rather than an unlimited dial. A locked thermostat produces complaints and workarounds; a generous range almost never does.
Do not restrict heating in ways that could affect guest health or safety. Guests may include elderly people, infants, or someone unwell, and a property that cannot be made warm enough is both a welfare issue and, in many jurisdictions, a breach of letting standards. Set the lower limit at a genuinely comfortable temperature rather than the minimum you could defend, and never disable heating remotely during an occupied stay.
Lighting and appliances
Secondary in impact but easy and visible.
Presence-based lighting in hallways, bathrooms and outdoor spaces. Guests in an unfamiliar property appreciate lights that come on, and lights that go off after a delay solve the ones left burning for three days.
An all-off routine at check-out, triggered by the booking end and a confirmed empty property, catching everything left on.
Metering plugs on the obvious offenders — television, games console, coffee machine — which also tell you when a cycle finished if you are managing laundry.
Efficient bulbs everywhere, which is a one-off cost with no ongoing management.
Where tariffs come in
If you are on a dynamic or time-of-use tariff, a property with predictable empty periods is unusually well suited to load shifting. Heat the hot water cylinder in the cheapest hours. Schedule any electric heating around the price curve when the property is empty. Where there is an EV charger for guests, this matters considerably — guest charging can be a substantial cost, and scheduling it into cheap hours overnight is straightforward and invisible to the guest.
Charging guests for EV use deserves a mention: if you do, the meter needs to be accurate enough to bill from, which generally means MID-approved equipment rather than a consumer plug. Simply including a reasonable allowance is often less trouble.
Solar and batteries in a let property
Short lets have an unusual profile: occupancy is irregular, and empty days generate export rather than self-consumption. That weakens the economics compared with an occupied home, but two things improve it. A battery stores empty-day generation for occupied evenings, and hot water diversion puts surplus into the cylinder rather than exporting it cheaply, which suits a property whose main load is hot water.
Be realistic in the modelling. Run the numbers on your actual occupancy pattern rather than a standard household profile, because the difference is significant.
Telling guests, or not
Our view is that a short, friendly explanation helps rather than hurts. A line in the welcome guide saying the heating pauses when windows are open and adjusts when the property is empty, framed as how the property works, prevents the confusion that generates support messages — and a growing number of guests actively appreciate a property that is not wasteful.
What does not work is presenting it as a restriction, or asking guests to be economical. They are on holiday, and the request will be ignored while creating the impression of a mean host.
Hotels: the same logic, more rooms
Small hotels and guest houses share the incentive problem and have two additional levers.
Room-level control tied to occupancy. An unsold room needs frost protection and nothing else, and a sold room only needs comfort from check-in. Linking room heating and cooling to the reservation system rather than heating a whole floor continuously is the largest available saving in a small hotel, and it is a well-established practice rather than an experiment.
Key-card or presence linkage within the room. Common in larger hotels: air conditioning reduces when the room is unoccupied and restores on return. It works, and the caution is the same as for short lets — a modest setback that recovers quickly, not a deep one that leaves a guest in an uncomfortable room while it catches up.
Back-of-house is worth attention too, because it is nobody’s room and therefore nobody’s concern: kitchens, laundry, corridors and stores frequently account for more than guests do, and they respond to exactly the techniques described in the office shutdown article.
Where to start
- Meter the property for a fortnight and find your own consumption split.
- Booking-linked heating — setback when empty, pre-heat before arrival. Largest single saving.
- Window contacts pausing heating in each room.
- Hot water on a schedule, with the safety cycle retained.
- A generous temperature range rather than a fixed value or an unlimited dial.
- Presence lighting and a check-out all-off routine.
- Then tariff shifting, and only then consider generation and storage.
The first three account for most of the available saving in a typical property, cost very little, and require nothing at all from the guest — which is the only kind of energy measure that reliably works in accommodation somebody else is paying to enjoy.