Every homeowner is looking for ways to save a little bit of money on the monthly home energy heating bills. Everybody already knows lots about sealing your home, replacing your windows and adding insulation to cut down on your heating bill in the wintertime or even your cooling bill in the summer. But one even cheaper and easier step to do is to reduce how much your furnace or air conditioner is running during the day when there’s nobody home to benefit from it. That’s why in this blog, we’ll tell you about how the right thermostat can save you money!
The way to do that is by turning down your thermostat when you leave for work for the day and turning it down again when you go to sleep when everybody’s in bed and only leaving it turned up to the comfortable temperature you want while you’re home to enjoy it.
There are three basic types of thermostats you can use to control your system now: Non-Programmable Thermostats, Programmable Thermostats, and Smart Thermostats.
Non-Programmable
The non-Programmable thermostat is really basic. Turn the face, set your temperature, and you’re done. You can still save energy even by using this old thermostat. You just manually have to remember to go over there before you leave for the day, turn it down 2 or 3 or 4 degrees, and the same thing before you climb into bed. Just turn that down 3 or 4 degrees, so you can get away with the same thermostat you’ve got and save some money.
Programmable Thermostats
The next step up would be a programmable thermostat. You can set it to almost an infinite number of settings for every day of the week. You’ve got a schedule that you set, your daytime schedule, your away schedule, and your nighttime schedule.
So you can set the furnace to go up and down or air-conditioner to come on and off and keep the temperature to what you want it to be when you’re not home and then again when you are back. That’s the next step up from the non-programmable one, and once you set your programs, you can just let it go, and it’ll do it on its own.
Smart Thermostats
The smart thermostat is your next step up, and it operates a lot like the programmable one. You’ve got the availability to set different times of the day to be whatever temperature you want it to be. Still, you can also monitor it wirelessly from your phone so if you’re going to be home early from work, maybe two or three hours earlier, compared to what you have that set for, you could pull your phone out at work, bring it up online and turn the temperature on. It will start warming up or cooling down already instead of being delayed for about three hours. You can also monitor your house through your phone.
There are lots of studies out there and lots of different numbers. The consensus is that if you can lower your heating temperature or raise your cooling temperature about four to five degrees, eight hours out of the day, you can save close to 10% on your heating and cooling bills. When you think about ten percent throughout the year, that can be significant savings for most of us, so you can see that you would quickly recoup the cost of any of the thermostats.
We hope this blog helped you better understand how the right thermostat can save you money! For all your HVAC needs, don’t hesitate to contact us.
