Tenants Rights - Air-conditioning

We live in a "luxury" rental in HK but discovered to my horror today that the building management restricts the central air-conditioning to a minimum of 22 degrees even though the individual thermostats could go a lot lower. Is this common practice? What recourse do we have if we want to get them to lower the temperature?

What does your lease/building management terms state? I must admit I never knew any apartments in HK that were on a communal cooling system, its common in commercial buildings however. Technically 22c is a reasonable temperature for a building. The Chartered Institute of Building Service Engineers in the UK suggests (for air conditioned offices not residential units though) that the temperature range for comfort should be 21-23ºC in winter and 22-24 ºC in summer, whilst the HK government recommends a rather high 25.5C. The chilled water supply will certainly serve all AHU’s/fan coil units & flats so having to provide just your flat will a lower air conditioning temperature (lower chilled water temp) would cost the building management dearly and they are likely to fight it especially as the 22c temperature provided is reasonable. Are there any M&E engineers who wish to comment further?

Well the building is centrally air-conditioned with individual thermostats in each apt that (in theory) can go down all the way to 10 degrees, except that the central unit for the building is set at 22 so that's that.

I've seen this happen in hotels in China (some of them 5 star!), but didnt expect this in HK. Flat's rented by my husband's company so I'm checking the terms with their rental management agency - just wondered if anyone else on this forum had similar issues.

Same in HK & actually most places. Building management control when AC or heating starts, turns off, lowest/highest temps etc. the thermostat knob can probably be turned down to 10c but that means nothing. In most HK offices past a set time (say 6.30pm) the AC goes off and stay late in the summer and you bake. In fact I have heard of buildings where thermostats were installed but left unconnected (they did nothing anyway) just to make the occupiers feel like they had some sort of control & stop calling building management!