Can four roommates agree on a thermostat without turning comfort into a morality test?

Our thermostat has become the most powerful object in the house.

There are four of us in a rented house with central air. One roommate sleeps hot and wants the temperature low enough to use a comforter. Another is cold at anything below what she calls “human indoor weather.” I work from home in the smallest upstairs room, which warms faster than the living room where the thermostat lives. The fourth roommate claims not to care, then quietly changes the setting whenever nobody is looking.

We started with a simple number. That lasted two days. Then came the exceptions: lower at night, higher when someone is home alone, no changes during video calls because the system is loud, and a different rule if the oven has been on. We now have a group chat full of thermostat screenshots that look like updates from a tiny, hostile weather station.

The financial argument makes it worse. The roommate who prefers it coolest offered to pay more of the electric bill, but nobody knows how to isolate the cost cleanly. The roommate who is cold says money is not the only issue; she does not want to wear a jacket in her own kitchen. Fans and extra blankets help individual rooms, but each person thinks the other side's personal solution should be easier.

I suggested choosing a modest range rather than one sacred number, then setting morning, evening and overnight bands for two weeks. We would stop touching the thermostat outside the bands unless everyone agrees, and each person could adjust their own room with low-drama measures that do not create a separate safety problem. At the end, we would discuss sleep and comfort, not prosecute individual button presses.

One roommate says this is absurdly formal for adults sharing a house. I agree. I also think the absence of a clear system has produced something even more absurd.

Has anyone found a house rule that respects genuinely different comfort levels without promising perfect equality? Should the person asking for the most energy-intensive setting pay more, or does that invite impossible accounting and resentment?