I am looking to upgrade the thermostats in my house and I was thinking that maybe a little money invested into a programmable thermostat might help keep my bills down since I am terrible at turning down the heat before I leave for work.
Anyone have any experience with these or can reccommend one for me? Also what are the downfalls to having one of these in a house? Thanks!
I have a very basic one. It’s a 5+2 day meaning Mon-Fri share a schedule and Sat-Sun share a schedule. Cost me about $30 and took about 10 minutes to install
Not sure if it saves me that much but by far it’s best feature is waking up to a warm house every morning. Can’t think of any downsides. I guess if your schedule varied a lot it would be difficult. I usually forget about it when I have a random weekday day off and about 9am I start to notice the house feels cold. One button press disables the schedule though and allows you to just set the temp like a traditional thermostat.
I’ve heard a lot of good things about these…
+1 to JayS. Just keep it simple. There is no need for wifi or any of that other overly complicated stuff. A basic 5+2 is all you will need.
I saw these, but for $250 I really can’t justify it. Will Lowes have these $30 thermostats you speak of?
I have also heard great things about the NEST
Spending 250 per thermostat will impeed on your ability to actually save any money by upgrading.
http://www.lowes.com/pd_356344-74493-RTHL2310B1008_0__?productId=3464340
The Nest one is a huge waste of money. Their whole argument is that they developed a “learning” thermostat because people are too dumb to program a regular programmable one and end up using them like traditional thermostats. If you’re so dumb you can’t program a thermostat following the simple instructions it came with I guess you deserve to be charged an extra $220. Call it a stupidity tax.
I will pick up 2 of the honeywells this week. For some reason, I thought it was going to cost me a lot more to get this done than $50+/-. Thanks for the help guys!
Here is the one I bought. It’s rated very high with consumer reports and works well. You can program 4 different times, and all of the days. Has a nice feature to show the use of the filter as well.
I have one of these in my house and LOVE it. so easy to set, can set individual days or multiple (non-consecutive) days. You can also set the hold time if you want to bump it up for a bit. They offer this one with 1 heat/1 cool, 2 heat/ 1 cool. 2 heat/2 cool and 3 heat/2 cool configurations. I have a 2h/1c at my home (I think.) I am fairly certain my parents have the same one and they like it a lot as well. mine also has the Exterior temp displayed on it as well.
1H/1C
2H/2C
I only have baseboard heating and no forced air A/C. All the fancy filter, A/C gadgets are usless to me as of right now.
I bought the NEST and find it to be useful. We have a large house and two thermostats. It might be a little different here in Phoenix, than Buffalo, but my energy costs are very high during the summer months. I was able to recoup my money this summer. I head to work and I’m not too stupid to program my thermostat. Problem is, my wife is sometimes home with the kids, and sometimes gone for the day. The thermostat will sense when nobody is around, and go into a standby mode.
I actually like looking at my energy consumption. I get a monthly summary that shows the temperature in my area versus my energy demand, along with how many hours my AC units were on per day. It has become a game to me to get more and more efficient. Plus, energy costs considerably more during the 3-6PM M-F, so I monitor my usage during that time.
This may all sound stupid to you, and you will want to continue to program your 7 day VCR thermostats.
couldnt have said it better myself… I have had the nest for almost a year now, and love it. I have all my reports that get emailed to me and I can compare them to the following months or average use in the area that I reside in. I couldn’t be happier with it.
the most expensive thermostat is the one that controls an entire house…no matter how smart or expensive a single zone thermostat is, you are just throwing money away because the temperature in a relatively small portion of your house determines the temperature everywhere else.
obviously it would be extremely expensive to add zones to a forced air system but since we are talking hot water base board it would be a little easier if the whole house isn’t just set up as 1 large continuous loop. is there a manifold at the boiler? having even 2 zones (living/dining/kitchen & bedrooms) can make a big difference for the cost of a couple of zone valves.
or if you don’t have the itch to add zones you can create some ‘virtual zoning’ by getting a thermostat that is compatible with remote sensors. you aren’t going to find them at lowes or homedepot but there are suppliers online or even amazon. white-rodgers makes a series of thermostats that you can add maybe 4 additional sensors to so you would essentially have 5 points of temperature measurement which you can individually set to a temperature and establish priorities for each. i used it on a rental property i have where there is only 1 furnace…keeps the tenants from freezing or heating each other out if either one had sole control over the thermostat
72 degrees all year long, fuck gas and electric bills. thats how I roll.
I have baseboard also and I just keep it set a constant temp (2 zones in the house) but feel that the baseboard recovery from lowering the temp takes much longer to get back than a forced air setup and have always wondered that if lowering the temp is actually not a benifit with baseboard :shrug:
Baseboard needs to be set at a consistent temp. Yoyo temps are for forced hot air.
Expert says not true.
It costs less to move a unit of heat in liquid than in air