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Programmable thermostats are designed to provide energy savings without sacrificing comfort in accordance with the lifestyle of household occupants. To leverage the most energy savings from your new thermostat, make sure you follow a few simple guidelines.
Saving Energy With Programmable Thermostats
If you’re already accustomed to manually adjusting the thermostat to save energy during working and sleeping hours, then implementing a programmable thermostat into your daily routine should be a snap, with the added bonus of arriving home and/or awakening to comfortable temperatures.
Most programmable thermostats offer at least four daily temperature-event changes, which offer the capability to alternate the temperature in your home between your comfort settings and energy-saving settings multiple times a day.
For instance, you may program a temperature change to meet your comfort setting from the time you awaken in the morning and leave for work. The next event change would turn back/up the temperature to an energy-saving setting during working hours, followed by a third event change to bring your household to a comfortable temperature by the time you arrive home.
Balancing Comfort and Savings
If you and/or other household occupants have difficulty striking a balance between comfortable temperatures and energy-saving settings, then, fortunately, you’re somewhat familiar with the key ingredient for saving energy with a programmable thermostat — consistency.
Programmable thermostats offer a “hold” feature, which allows for adjusting temperature changes on the fly to override the programmed setting. Using this feature too often will quickly cancel out any energy savings you have garnered from adhering to programmed energy-saving settings during working and sleeping hours.
To avoid making the “hold” feature a habit, program temperature changes more conservatively, and you’ll still enjoy energy savings. Once you have become acquainted with the programmable thermostat, you can fine-tune your programmed settings as needed.
Also, if you are concerned about unauthorized temperature adjustments or changes to program settings, you may block unauthorized users with the handy keypad “lockout” feature.
Contact Ibbotson Heating & Air Conditioning Co. for more information about programmable thermostats and additional ways to boost comfort and savings in your home in the northwest suburbs of Chicago.
Our goal is to help educate our customers in Chicago, Illinois about energy and home comfort issues (specific to HVAC systems). For more information about programmable thermostat and other HVAC topics, download our free Home Comfort Resource guide.
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