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We moved into our second-floor, one-bedroom apartment a year ago, and have had a very cordial (if distant) relationship with our landlord. His English is not great, and we always pay our rent on time and are generally self-sufficient, so there hasn’t been need for much contact.

Last week, I got a call from one of the guys who works for the landlord (there are a few young men who do odd jobs around the building, I don’t know if they are hired or family). He was yelling at me about the heating bill for the past month. The thermostat for the entire building is in our apartment, but we’ve never adjusted it. The temperature has never been a problem, and we always assumed that it wasn’t connected, or was broken (there’s a clock in the thermostat that has never worked).

I explained that to the guy on the phone, who was incredulous. He yelled that we were taking advantage of them for letting us control the heat by turning it up. I asked him to come over and to take a look at it, and he calmed down. Someone came by on Saturday, and changed the batteries (who knew?) in the thermostat. The clock now works, and the guy set the thermostat for daytime and nighttime settings, which seem to be working.

He then told my boyfriend that he should turn the heat off during the day — that the people who lived there before always did. This seems unbelievable — both that someone would agree to shut off the heat to the whole building during the daytime (my boyfriend works from home, there is a small office on the first floor, and a single mother and her seven-year-old son on the third floor), but also that the particular previous tenants would (they had a two-year-old girl who was home all day with a full-time nanny). We could call the previous tenants to confirm, but confirmation that we’re right will just end up in a he-said, she-said with the landlord, and being right isn’t worth it.

My boyfriend asked if he could see a copy of the bill, but the guy wasn’t interested in sharing it. After we have lived there for twelve months without touching the thermostat, it seems like something must be funny with the bill for the past month. Either the company was charging estimated costs and finally checked the meter (causing a huge, one-time overage), or heating costs went up with the first of the year, or something else we haven’t thought of.

Has this situation happened to anyone? We really don’t want to have a contentious relationship with the landlord, nor do we want to be responsible for shutting off the heat to the building during the day, but without a copy of the bill we’re having a hard time figuring out the cause of the cost increase.