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As long as it’s basically functional, you probably don’t think about your thermostat very much. And when we tell you that new, high-tech thermostats have greater precision and are easier to read and set, you might shrug. That sounds nice, you might think, but I’m not sure it’s worth the bother.
But what if we could tell you how to cut your yearly heating and cooling bill by about ten percent? The US Energy Information Administration did a study that found that residents of New England spend more on heating and cooling our homes than residents of any other region of the US. Paying ten percent less for heating and cooling means significant savings for you. Here’s how a thermostat upgrade can help you achieve that.
Precision
Yes, that precision we mentioned earlier does play a part in this. If your thermostat is old, and especially if it’s the sort with a dial you turn and little lines approximating temperatures, you can’t have very precise control over the temperature in your home. Keeping your house only a couple of degrees warmer or cooler than you meant to can really add up over time. Also, the lack of accuracy might mean you make a lot of adjustments to your thermostat as you realize you’re not quite as comfortable as you’d hoped. This can mean interrupting the heating or cooling cycles of your HVAC system, which can also decrease efficiency.
Programmability
The real way to cut your heating and cooling bills is to limit the time when you’re keeping your home at an ideal temperature. If you’re away at work all day, you can let summer temperatures get a little high or winter temperatures get a little low. (Just don’t set your thermostat below 55, or you’ll risk frozen pipes!)
Raising your thermostat by ten degrees for eight hours a day during the summer, and lowering your thermostat by ten degrees for eight hours a day in the winter, becomes easy with a programmable thermostat. And doing that can decrease the energy costs of heating and cooling your home by ten percent. You can set the thermostat to start bringing your home back to your ideal temperature before you arrive home each day, so you’ll always return to a perfectly comfortable home.
Smart Technology
Smart thermostats learn your habits and can help you tailor your programmed temperatures to fit your schedule and save you money. They even track your usage and provide you with data—and recommendations for how to be even more efficient.
With a new smart thermostat, you can adjust your home’s temperature without getting out of bed or off the couch, just using an app on your phone. But it goes beyond that. What if you’ve turned off your work-week programming while you spent some time working from home, and then you’ve gone back to the office without remembering to reset it? You can do that from the office, no problem! What if you forgot to program the thermostat to save energy before you left for a ten-day vacation thousands of miles away? You can program it from your vacation spot anywhere in the world!
So if you’d like to save money on your heating in Milford, CT, a smart thermostat can cut your costs while keeping you every bit as comfortable.
