Proportional

I have been a home owner for nearly three years now. Saving energy is important to us, not just to save money, but because we want to be conscientious about the worlds resources and we do believe that burning fossil fuels contributes to global warming.

One simple change you will find recommended over and over again is the installation of a programmable thermostat. This is something that most people can do on their own with a little bit of knowledge about electricity and how to keep yourself safe from electrical shock. It should be noted that while most thermostatic control systems are low voltage, older houses, like ours, may have line voltage control wiring which can be dangerous to work with if you don’t understand how to cut power to the thermostat and test the wiring to be sure no current is flowing. If in doubt about these things, have an electrician do it for you. It adds to the cost of implementation and extends the payback period, but payback can be substantial so it is probably worth it.

Programmable thermostats typically allow you to set varying low temperatures during the day. Usually there are weekday and weekend settings and four daily temperature settings for both weekdays and weekends. The theory is that we all have relatively predictable lives and that we will want the house to heat up and cool down at the same times every day. My experience in our own relatively simple household (small house, two adults and animals) is that our schedule is not predictable either on weekdays or weekends.

My wife is a nurse and works three to four days a week, sometimes all during the work week, sometimes on weekends. I work in the city during the work week but like to work from home one day a week at least. The long and the short of it is that there is no predictable schedule in our household that we can set our programmable thermostat for.

So, we have taken a different approach that has proved highly successful in helping us use no more heat than we need. We have the thermostat set to 60 degrees all the time. Each of the four possible daily temperature settings have been set to 60 degrees and the settings are at six hour intervals. But, you might ask, why not just keep your old thermostat and set it to 60 degrees? Why use a programmable thermostat? And here is where I tell you that the key to our system is that anyone in the house has permission to turn the temperature up if they get cold, which happens all the time. 60 degrees after all is chilly to most human beings (we’ve had no complaints from the dogs). So, go ahead, turn the temperature up to 65 degrees (which is usually plenty enough to warm us up). Within a maximum of six hours time the thermostat will reset to 60 degrees.

This has been amazingly successful for us. This past winter, for the first time, the gas company owed us money. We are on an even billing system which averages consumption and charges across the full year so we don’t get hit with big fuel bills during the winter. Every year there is an adjustment to account for changes in use, price of fuel, harshness of winter, and we have always owed them money. This year they owed us a couple of hundred bucks.

Programmable thermostats are worth the investment, but you may find that you will need to deploy a system like ours if you don’t want to go crazy trying to anticipate your life’s schedule.