Many people would assume having paid for an air-conditioned room in hostels means it guarantees access to the AC, but that’s not always the case.
Recently, TikTok content creator steamingbeanbuns, aka Belle, shared a video of herself in her Nanyang Technological University hostel.
“Currently I’m sleeping without air-con because NTU housing got suspicious of me and everyone on this level of tampering with our air-con, and they’ve forcefully made all our air-cons offline so that we can’t use it,” she ranted.
She shared that she could only turn on the fan in her room and had to resort to placing a portable fan next to her on the bed to deal with the heat.
“I take environmental science bro how the **** would I tamper with the air-con,” she raged in her caption.
Wait, what does she even mean by tamper with the air-con? In a reply to a netizen’s comment, Belle said others have done so in order to “escape air-con fees”.
So how does it work?
Based on this writer’s experience as a former NTU hall resident, students are not able to turn on the air-con as and when they like despite having paid for an air-con room.
Instead, they have to buy a pre-paid card and tap it on a sensor in their room every time they want to switch on the air-con.
The card, which can be topped-up, will then have its value deducted depending on the duration the air-con was switched on.
Some students have apparently been hacking the card to increase the number of credits. Students can get $50 worth of credits in their card even though they only topped up $10.
8days.sg reached out to Belle to check if the system has changed, but did not get a response as of press time.
Past and present NTU students have taken to the comments to share their experience with the NTU hostel air-con.
“I’ve been tampering for the past few semesters but this never happened to me. If anything, they gave us free AC while they try to fix the problem,” confessed one student.
Another student, however, shared that the air-con hacking has been made impossible after the halls spent money upgrading the cards.
Belle’s response? “Obviously not… I’m a clear victim here.”