With the cold season here, now’s a good time for resetting the programmable thermostat in your home. Since last spring, if you’ve been doing it right, the programmable has been set so it allows indoor temperatures to rise several degrees during the day while you’re at work or elsewhere for more than several hours. When cooling season transitions to heating season, your thermostat requires a transition as well.
Improperly setting a programmable thermostat will result in less than optimum energy savings. Practically speaking, you might as well be using an old-school manual thermostat that you have to adjust and readjust yourself. However, when it’s correctly set, a programmable thermostat can ease the workload on your cooling and heating systems, saving energy, reducing stress on parts, and creating a more comfortable household.
Following is a typical cold-weather temperature change schedule when resetting the programmable thermostat for the winter:
- Evening or daytime when the home is occupied: Program the temperature at the setting you’re comfortable with when awake at home. For most people, in the wintertime, that’s around 70 degrees, though preferences vary.
- Overnight: The temperature should be set several degrees lower than your comfort level, since most people prefer cooler temperatures when they’re sleeping.
- Morning: Program the thermostat to return to a comfortable temperature shortly before you expect to wake up. (You might decide to skip this step if you awaken and leave the house relatively quickly.)
- Daytime: Set the temperature at a much lower level while you’re at work, since it’s futile to fully heat an empty house.
During the Yuma area’s short, mild winter, you’ll probably find that the temperatures are warm enough that heat isn’t needed during certain times of the day. In that case, your system will just shut down until heat is called for. Your thermostat also should have controls that allow you to switch between heating and cooling during those tricky weeks in Southwest Arizona when one day you need heat and the next day you need A/C.
For more advice on resetting the programmable thermostat, please contact us at Hansberger Refrigeration and Electric Company.
Our goal is to help educate our customers in Yuma, Arizona about energy and home comfort issues (specific to HVAC systems). For more information about thermostats and other HVAC topics, download our free Home Comfort Guide or call us at 928-723-3183.
Credit/Copyright Attribution: “sashkin/Shutterstock”
