During the chilly season, most homeowners try to compensate for the weather outside by cranking up the heat inside to keep family members comfortable. While this might indeed provide temporary relief from the cold, it also has the effect of cranking up your energy usage and heating bills along with it. A better way to maintain warmth and manage energy usage at the same time is to make effective use of your programmable thermostat if you have one, or to install one if you don’t.

How a programmable thermostat helps with heating

Thermostats in general are designed to detect when room temperature drops by as much as a degree or 1-1/2 degrees, and to initiate the heating cycle when that happens. If your thermostat is set to cycle heat on when the temperature drops less than a degree, a condition called ‘rapid cycling’ occurs, and the heat cycle will be triggered much more often, which is a huge waste of energy. If the temperature drop were to be set at two degrees or even higher, the actual feeling of warmth in a room would be approximately the same, but the energy savings would be significant.

The real advantage of a programmable thermostat in the first place is to have much greater control of room temperatures at various times throughout the day. If the family is away from home all day or for several days, the temperature can be programmed to be 60 degrees until their return. The same is true for the hours that family members are sleeping or working at jobs – when residents are away or asleep, set the temperature to 60, and when everyone is home and awake, it can be set to 68 degrees.

Contact us

For more than thirty years now, Overland Park Heating and Cooling Inc.has been providing the highest quality products and service to residences and businesses in the areas of Overland Park, Johnson County, and the greater Kansas City region. If you need expert advice on any kind of home comfort issue, please contact us and we’ll be glad to discuss it.

Our goal is to help educate our customers in Overland Park, Kansas about energy and home comfort issues (specific to HVAC systems). 

Credit/Copyright Attribution: “Danylo Samiylenko/Shutterstock”