Is your family caught up in a thermostat war? It’s not uncommon for people living in a household to have differences of opinions about what temperature the thermostat for the HVAC should be set to when cooling and heating the home. Hopefully you won’t squabble too much and can usually come up with a compromise for temperature settings to control the HVAC equipment.
Families need to pay attention to their home’s temperature not only for comfort’s sake but also to stay within budget for operating their HVAC equipment. If you’ve noticed that your utility bills are higher than usual these days, you should know that a smart thermostat for your HVAC will save you money by lowering the amount of energy needed to keep the home comfortable in every season.
A basic HVAC thermostat with just a set of up-down buttons and a readout requires you to manually set the temperature. This means, for example, that you might set the HVAC thermostat to activate the furnace whenever your home entertainment room falls below 66 degrees F. Then your shivering spouse leaps off the couch to push the “up” button to adjust the HVAC settings until the home is closer to 72 degrees while you are preparing a sandwich during a commercial break.
When the spouse leaves the room, you adjust the temperature for the HVAC once again. Agreeing to a compromise temperature that you program into the thermostat and donning or removing sweaters as needed will lead to greater family harmony.
Using a programmable or smart thermostat for the HVAC can help your family “go green” and save money on utility bills. In fact, you can expect that your heating bill will go down 2% for every degree that you turn down the thermostat, according to the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy. So, if you program the HVAC thermostat to lower the temperature from 73 F to 68 F, you should see a savings of about 10 percent in your utility bill.
With a smart HVAC thermostat, you can set up different heating and cooling settings for various situations. For example, if no one is at home during the afternoon, with kids in school and parents at work, you could program the HVAC system to turn on the heat or air conditioning beginning around 4 p.m., Monday through Friday. But on the weekends when people are coming and going more often, you can program a different HVAC temperature setting.
What’s more, you can get a smart thermostat that connects wirelessly via your home’s computer network to the Internet, transmitting information about the state of your HVAC system. You could be at work and see that the HVAC equipment’s thermostat setting is too high or too low to cope with a significant weather change and change the programming while you’re at work or on the go, using your smartphone to make changes from remote.
The experts at AirPlus are standing by to help you get the most out of your AC and heater by installing a smart thermostat to control the home’s HVAC system. If you are uncertain about what model or type of thermostat to get for your HVAC, we will be happy to advise you and then install it for you. For details or to set an appointment to add a smart thermostat to your HVAC system, please call AirPlus today.
SOURCE:
American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy
Smarter House: Energy Saving Tips
http://smarterhouse.org/heating-systems/energy-saving-tips
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