Quote:
Originally Posted by Flames89
While I can't say I know exactly how a furnace works, I do know that industrial refridgerators work within a fairly wide band.
So, if you set the temperature to (say) 5C. The compressor will turn on, and the refridge will cool down to about 3C, then turn off and not turn on until 8C... the idea is that the average sits around 5C.
Heating systems are very inefficient - we do not live in closed systems, there is heat leakage from every crack in our walls and ecery window, and unless you live in a high-end Pentagon server-room, then our heaters are not going to blast on as a result of us turning off 4 lightbulbs. They just approximate the temperature via an average.
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All true, so by turning off the 4 bulbs the temperature is going to go down quicker and you are going to reach the bottom trigger a bit sooner.
In reality yes the amount of heat is so small the difference will be almost zero, but it is NOT zero.
Way back when oil was scarce, Toronto had a campaign where they wanted everyone to turn off their lights to conserve energy. It was very successful, there was a very distinct drop in the amount of electricity used.
Problem is that that actually made the oil problem worse, because offices and multi-family buildings which used heating oil to heat actually had the demand go UP as a result. And since electricity wasn't generated by oil, there was no offset on the other side from people conserving, so the net result was more oil used.
Again this is my point, you can raise awareness all you want, but at the end of the day if people aren't doing things that actually have a real positive impact, then it's nothing more than a marketing scheme.