Set It and Forget It
Minnesota is inching closer to those two weeks in May when we need neither our furnace nor our air conditioner. It's a great time to do furnace maintenance. It's also a good time to switch out a classic mechanical thermostat for a programmable electronic model. The model we installed allows four temperature settings per day and different weekday/weekend settings. In the winter, we typically set ours at 70 degrees for morning school/work routines, 60 during the day (the dog gets a blanket to cuddle), 70 again in the evening, and then 65 overnight. I would set it at 60 overnight but, apparently, that's “inhumane.” Given year-to-year changes in average temperature, we can't tell how much money we are saving by using a programmable thermostat, but the experts say you can save $180 per year on average. You can pick one up for less than fifty bucks, so that's a pretty quick payback.
A friend told me he doesn't turn his thermostat down in the winter because it will take as much energy to heat the house back up as you save by letting the temperature drop. The US Department of Energy has a good explanation of why that is not true (look under “General Thermostat Operation”).
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