If you own an apartment here but live somewhere else, the heating problem is not really about heat. It is about not being on the island when the decision has to be made.
A manual thermostat — the kind with a dial and an on/off switch — assumes somebody is standing in the room. For an owner in Manchester, Warsaw or Berlin, that assumption fails every time. You cannot turn the heating on before guests land. You cannot turn it off when they leave. You find out the switch was left on when the electricity bill arrives.
That is the whole case for app-controlled heating in a property you do not live in. Not comfort — control.
Tenerife is warm, so most apartments were built for summer — thin walls, tiled floors, very little insulation. That is comfortable for nine months and genuinely cold for the other three. Interior temperatures in shaded or north-facing properties drop to around 12–13°C on winter evenings, which is colder than most northern European guests expect from a Canary Islands booking, because their own homes at home are heated.
The reviews follow. "Beautiful apartment but freezing in the evening" is a common complaint on winter lets here, and it is expensive — not because of the heating, but because of what it does to your rating during the months you most need bookings.
You do not need to heat a whole apartment to fix this. In practice the money is in two rooms:
| Room | Why | Typical heated area |
|---|---|---|
| Bathroom | The complaint that generates reviews. A cold tiled floor first thing is what people remember. | 4–6 m² |
| Living room | Where guests actually spend winter evenings. | 12–20 m² |
| Bedrooms | Rarely worth it — people are under a duvet. | usually skipped |
A bathroom alone is a small job and the most common place owners start. You can work out the exact size and running cost for your rooms with the running cost calculator — it shows the arithmetic rather than asking you to trust a number.
Electric underfloor heating is cheap to install and the worry is always the electricity. With a programmable thermostat the system cycles off once the floor reaches temperature, so it draws power perhaps a third to 40% of the hours it is switched on. A bathroom runs to a few euros a week across a five-month season.
With a manual switch it runs continuously until somebody turns it off — and in a property where nobody is there to turn it off, that is the entire bill. The thermostat is not an accessory to this decision. It is the decision.
Heating mat or film sized to your rooms, plus an app-controlled thermostat, direct from the European manufacturer — a fraction of what the same equipment costs locally, when it is available at all.
Installation can be arranged separately if you need it. Many owners have their existing builder or electrician fit it during a renovation, which is the cheapest time to do it because the floor is already up.
Works with Alexa, Google Home and Home Assistant. If you already run a smart home, the thermostat joins it rather than sitting outside it in its own app.