Thermostats

Lowering your heating and cooling costs today without sacrificing home comfort and convenience is an achievable goal. Today’s soaring costs of heating and cooling your home can be reduced by simply installing a Programmable Thermostat. Also referred to as Set Back thermostats, it allows homeowners to set different temperatures at preset levels throughout the day. Saving money is the end result.

Consider this scenario. If you go to bed at 10 p.m. you can program the thermostat to automatically drop the temperature from 21 degrees to 19 degrees. This allows you to decrease unnecessary energy consumption while asleep. A Set Back thermostat will also allow you to automatically raise the temperature to a comfortable temperature during waking hours. For example, you can have your home toasty and warm when you wake up those cold winter mornings by programming the thermostat for 6:00am to bring the temperature from 19 degrees back to 21 degrees. To take it one step further you can have the system programmed back to 19 degrees at 8:00am once you head to work and the kids are off to school. This would avoid heating and cooling an unoccupied home at 21 degrees which is waste of your hard earned money and our precious resources.

Summer months are programmed in the same manner. Your cooling settings can be programmed to accommodate the temperature you want in your home during various times in the day.
Not only will you save on your hydro and gas bills but you’ll also eliminate the need to manually turn the thermostat down at night and back up in the morning. Once you set your desired comfort level for both summer and winter months you’ll never have to program it again. However, there is a manual override feature that allows you to override your settings for any length of time and can be reset at the push of a button.

Reports indicate that if you program your thermostat to decrease the temperature eight hours every night or while you’re away from home, your savings will be significant.

An ENERGY STAR thermostat has key features such as four temperature settings per day which allows you to set the temperature specifically for different times in the day. It also allows you to set the different temperatures for different days of the week including weekends. Temperature settings can be over-ridden manually without disrupting your regular set program.

Some important features to consider before purchasing a programmable thermostat are ensure it has repeat multiple settings, a manual override to allow you to change the current temperature without affecting your program, a back-up battery to save the program in case of a power outage and instructions printed on the inside cover so you don’t need the owner’s manual for programming.
Once installed, it will pay for itself in no time.