Hello, I am a renter in an apartment complex and I believe back in 2021 my landlord replaced the existing Honeywell thermostats with the Nest Thermostat E. Each unit has its own heating and cooling, but part of the system is normally in a small closet in the room that only maintenance has access to.
It's been a while, but I don't recall any issues with cooling with the previous thermostat, but ever since the nest was installed, there have been problems with it and the landlord had been... a landlord... at first when the thermostat was installed during the middle of a heat wave which was smart, we set everything up on our end to operate it from the app, but the temperature instantly began to shoot up and it was 90 degrees within the hour in our room. Fortunately the landlord was very helpful and, just kidding they weren't so I ended up opening the wall back up myself and found that they had installed all the wires correctly, but somehow ripped the cooling wire in half a few inches down so it was no longer attached to the part that connects to the compressor unit. So I gave it the old "renter special" with some electrical tape (after turning off power at the circuit breaker ofc) and since then we can actually hear the compressor come on when it cools.
The issue that we've still been experiencing with cooling with the nest is that it never seems to cool more than 2 degrees or so relative to the temperature outside, so when it's 90+ degrees out as it has been the past few days and will be more frequently in the future, that means it's something like 88 degrees in our apartment.
I am also ironically happy to say that due to a recent catastrophic maintenance upkeep failure on the landlord's part (water heater bottomed out in the middle of the night and flooded the apartment downstairs, fire department broke down the door because 24 hour on-call maintenance isn't actually 24 hours), I now have access to this normally locked closet and would be willing to pay someone to get in there and fix whatever the issue is, assuming it's not something with the nest itself. I am able to see the product information on the compressor now and included a picture here.
Is this related to a setting on the nest itself? The "landlord special" installation that ripped the wire in half? My equally special wire fix? Or the fact that the compressor unit is the typical "cheapest available" option, featuring bonus Energy Star sticker riddled with typos, and very likely undersized for the space it's cooling?
If the issue turns out to be unrelated to the nest itself, what are some good "rental special" alternatives I could employ to ensure a comfortable temperature?
Relevant photos below:
