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One of the best investments you can make to keep your home efficiently heated is to replace the old mercury thermostats with the modern programmable digital ones of today. I just replaced two old thermostats in my house and I noticed the difference right away. My old thermostats were just so inaccurate that my house was never comfortably warm.
I have an older house with steam heat. I used to set my thermostat to 74 degrees when I got home and set it to 67 when I left. At 74 degrees it would get stifling hot at first and the boiler wouldn't run for a few hours. It would end up getting cold and by that time the boiler would have to work hard to reheat the water to make steam.
After I replaced my thermostats I noticed that when I set my house to 73-74 degrees it would stay at that temperature throughout the day. It was comfortable and my boiler would go on every 20-30 minutes or so just to maintain the heat. On top of that I like how you can program the temp of the house. I hated it when I used to forget to lower the thermostat to 65-67 when I left the house, which was a big waste of money.
I just converted to gas so I won't be able to tell how much I'm saving until I get my next bill. But I do know that once I switched out thermostats my house is being heated a lot more efficiently.
I've said it a million times: Wood stove with your own wood is the way to go. Even with a wife and kid at home most days we use less than 300 gals of oil for heat and hot water in a calendar year and I've yet to pay a dollar for wood. You can't beat it, and the combined time forwood splitting is just a few full days, though I spread it out a few hours at a time after work in April/May.
I estimate we save about 800 gals of fuel at say 3.50/gallon. Self reliance pays!
PS: The is always 70+ during the day...about 63/64 when I wake up in the AM.
74 is a bit warm for us. We keep ours between 68 and 70 degrees all day home or not. We have gas. I will say this though we need new windows because there is a draft coming from 2 of them in the living room. I don't like feeling too hot at night when I sleep.
Give it a year or 2 and those T-stats will be $100.
And I think you can get one of those thermostats for multiple zones. You place the nest on your main zone and place temperature sensors where your other t-stats used to be. Then tie it all into a logic board. Then from there it will run your pump, boiler, etc.
Although slightly off topic, why is it people who don't pay the utility bills want the house cooled to 68 degrees in the Summer but heated to 72 degrees in the Winter? I argue with my wife about this year-round and don't understand why if 72 degrees is comfortable in the Winter it's not also comfortable in the Summer. I mean, a ton of feathers weighs as much as a ton of bricks, right?
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