Get Your Heating Bills Under Control With a Programmable Thermostat
If you’re looking for ways to cut down on your home’s heating and cooling bills, one of the most common tips you’ll find is to adjust your thermostat throughout the day -- turn the heat down during or the air conditioner up during the summer, turn them back up or down only when you’re actually at home, and turn them up or down again when it’s time for bed. In theory, this is a great idea since your furnace or air conditioner won’t be working as hard to heat or cool the house when you’re not actually home or aren’t actively up and moving around the house.
According to Energy.gov, turning your thermostat down by 7℉-10℉ for 8 hours a day can help you save up to 10% on your energy bills every year. But if you’re not used to constantly adjusting your thermostat, it can be very easy to forget to change it before you leave the house so you might not reduce your bills as much as you’d like.
Programmable thermostats can give you the energy-saving benefits of adjusting your thermostat throughout the day while taking out the work of having to manually adjust it yourself. All you have to do is program it to adjust to certain temperatures at certain times of the day. You also won’t have to worry about coming home to a cold home and having to wait for it to heat up again because you can always program the thermostat to start warming things up again a little while before you get home.
All you have to do is set it to tell it what time you want the temperature to change. There are different types of programmable thermostats out there that you can set depending on what type of schedule would work best for you. A 5-1-1 programmable thermostat will let you have one schedule on weekdays and different schedules for Saturdays and Sundays while 5-2 models will let you have one schedule for weekdays and a different schedule for weekends. These models are great if your schedules tend to be pretty consistent. But if you have a more irregular schedule, a 7-day model thermostat will let you program a different schedule for each day of the week. Some types of programmable thermostats can even be adjusted through a computer or smartphone app so you’ll be able to adjust your thermostat if needed, even when you’re not at home.
If your home has zoned heating and cooling, programmable thermostats can be very nice to have. Is there someone in your home who is always freezing while there’s another person who is always too hot? If you have zoned heating, you can easily program their bedrooms to be at different temperatures so they’re both comfortable. Are there certain rooms in your house, such as an extra guest bedroom, that doesn’t get used very often? A programmable thermostat can keep those rooms consistently cooler (or warmer, depending on the time of year) than the other rooms in the house.
