<p>To answer the original question, he should sit down and discuss it with his roommate. What is the real issue here? Does the roommate like a cool house, say 60-63, and your S cranks the heat up to 75? Is the roommate hard-pressed financially? They can achieve a compromise for the common rooms. If one is living in a cold climate, one should be prepared to wear a sweater indoors, but also prepared to use <em>some</em> heat. </p>
<p>Maybe the roommate thinks that the place will be warm enough without ever turning on the heat: that’s true of plenty of apartments. Maybe they can agree to wait and see. Obviously, they have to split the regular electricity. Do they have some way of determining what portion is heat, other thancalculataing the difference between September and December? (This is going to be inexact, since the lights are also on much more in the winter.)</p>
<p>Have they lived together before? Has either of them spent the winter in this particular apartment?</p>
<p>My S rarely tells me anything like this, but maybe he’s just been comparatively lucky. The only reason I knew about the heat situation in his sublet was that I stayed there one or two nights when moving him in and getting things situated. (It was his first totally independent living situation. Otherwise I probably wouldn’t have been allowed to do that! 
)</p>