Programable Household Thermostats

[Northendzone]

^ firebug, you must be single - no woman on the face of the earth would want those temps unless she has herself a snugglie with a space blanket lining the inside.....

[Wormius]

Gees. I must be weird for keeping mine so high. I set it to 16 degC when nobody is at home, and 21 degC after.

I don't see how setting it low is a problem, I mean.. the furnace just stops burning and it drifts down to 16 (we don't have a corresponding air conditioner) although I can
understand how it would probably tax the furnace to raise it back up before we get home from work.

[troutman]

I have floor heating in three bathrooms. #humblebrag

My utility bill for December was outlandish. I turned down all the floor heating, and I will let you know if it made a big difference on the next bill.

[J Diddy]

Google purchased Nest to add it to their android@home home automation system. Not sure what Google will do with all the temperature data they will likely collect.

I like it colder at night...18 degrees and at 20 otherwise. I find that my house cools off quite quickly at night and the furnace has to run all night to keep it at 18. The blower in my furnace is so loud it wakes me up... It's a brand new high efficiency one too. If I drop it to 17 the furnace kicks in less but the blower still wakes me up. So I need it at 17 or 18 for a comfortable sleep temperature but the furnace won't let me sleep. I'm a zombie right now... Can't wait for the summer when I can turn the furnace off. Not sure of any other solution as I had are is adjust the blower to as low as it will go.

[Swayze11]

I have had a nest for over 2 years now. When we built our house it was one of the first things I installed so I can't comment on cost savings but the auto away feature without question would save people money.

I like having the ability to turn on the fan in the summer when its really hot from my phone in bed. If anything it just looks way better then any other thermostat.

[pseudoreality]

Originally Posted by firebug

You are all wimps...

18.5 during the day.

13.5 at night.

I would not recommend going that low in cold climates. You want to make sure the dew point is somewhere past your vapour barrier. If you room temp gets too low you'll condensation on the wall.

Condensation = water = mould

I recently upgraded the insulation in my house and run my thermostat at 17 C at night and during the day when i'm not home, 19 C when home and awake.

I've ran a cheap programmable thermostats for the last 10 years. Now i'm looking at setting up insteon home automation and one of their thermostats so i can check on the house while traveling.

[firebug]

Originally Posted by Northendzone

^ firebug, you must be single - no woman on the face of the earth would want those temps unless she has herself a snugglie with a space blanket lining the inside.....

Married with 3 kids actually ;-) If she's cold in bed, she knows how to get warmed up...

From Dec 19 to Jan 22 our home used 20.4 gj of natural gas and 1438 kwh of electricity (our largest consumption of the year). We have 3 furnaces and two hot water tanks (one tank and one rinnai) supplying our home (~2,200 sq ft) and detached garage (heated - reznor)/carriage sweet (~700 sq ft).

[Erick Estrada]

Weekday schedule on my Honeywell:

- 67 deg. F from 12:00 a.m to 6:30 a.m.
- 70 deg. F from 6:30 a.m. to 8:00 a.m.
- 67 deg. F from 8:00 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.
- 70 deg. F from 4:30 p.m. to 12:00 a.m.

I prefer to use the Fahrenheit scale for better resolution than Celsius.

[The Yen Man]

I program mine to be 19 for hours when I'm awake and in the house, 18 for sleeping hours, 20 when I wake up, and 17 when I leave the house. I'm paranoid about the chance of pipes freezing, so I never set it below 17.

[Barnes]

Originally Posted by nfotiu

Your science sounds a lot more sound than the previous post. It is often repeated though by builder and hvac types that you shouldn't have it vary more than a few degrees. The highway/city analogy is not really at all convincing. Acceleration, energy lost to braking, and momentum do not seem to have anything to do with energy used to maintain a temperature in a house.

Haven't mythbusters tackled this yet? They should.

The city/highway analogy is better suited for houses that have heat pumps or geothermal. For the majority of us living in Calgary, we have gas forced air furnaces which are much better at heating quickly, thermostats set to setback will save on energy. I did some research on this when I originally got the Nest to ensure I/it was using the optimum settings. Definitely something the Mythbusters should tackle though. Some of the myths they're doing this and last season... oh boy.

I went from a non programmable thermostat to the Nest so usage is considerably less but as to how much less, can't really say that I've paid enough attention to comment. Gas is so cheap anyways. If Nest can figure out how to reduce service fees, riders, admin fees, fee fees, and all the other fees, that would be sweet.

As for the Nest itself, autoway is the feature that will allow to see the most savings. The learning aspect is ok if your schedule is consistent week to week but it's still really a slave to the schedule and the motion sensors once it has learned and you will need to adjust the schedule.

The Time to temp feature works great. It will know that if it's -20 outside and you have it scheduled to warm to 19 by 5:00 it takes x number of minutes to get to 19 but if it's only -2 outside it will only take y minutes to warm to 19 by 5:00. Nice in the morning as the house is consistently warm for when you wake up.

The fan scheduling is awesome in the summer. I schedule it to run for 30 mins at 5:00 everyday so that the cold basement air is circulated throughout the house by the time I get home.

There are many nice little features like the Nest will shut of the furnace before it reaches the set temp but keep the fan running to circulate hot air in the ducts to get to the final temp. It does this with AC as well.

I regret not getting the 2nd gen that allows you to control the humidifier as well. It would have been nice to get rid of that ugly control box.

[Northendzone]

not long ago I bought a new thermostat and went for the middle of the road honeywell ($100), I wanted to look at the NEST, but HD did not have any in stock.

Tried to wire in the Honeywell WiFi model, but could nto get it to work, despite the fact the Honeywell website made it look so easy.

[albertGQ]

Speaking of heat, anyone's lastest Enmax bill been abnormally high?
Troutman says his was. Anyone else?

Mine was the highest ever. About 13% higher than the previous personal record high

[Ace]

^Me too, thought the same thing when I read Trout's post

[Wormius]

Mine was $334 the previous month, and $373 this month. Not a huge difference, and about on par for winter.

[ken0042]

Originally Posted by albertGQ

Speaking of heat, anyone's lastest Enmax bill been abnormally high?
Troutman says his was. Anyone else?

Mine was the highest ever. About 13% higher than the previous personal record high

Mine was also high; but I also did use a lot of electricity. I use electricity to heat the garage, and I was off the beginning of January and was doing a lot of work in the garage. Often I had it up to 12 degrees in there for a couple of days on end.

[calgarywinning]

You need to get rid of the electricity in your garage and run a gasoline. Electrical heating is outrageous compared to gas.

In the future, energy will become a major factor in home ownership, that's why controlling the schedule is so important because you can lop sizeable chunks off your bill with careful attention.

It's funny that what you wear and it's warmth factor and comfortability make a huge difference in how you run the household, also those gas fireplaces are amazing and cost dimes to run.

I think I will get the NEST for my new home.

[octothorp]

I like the specs of the Nest, but I have a hard time stomaching the idea that I'd need to shell out for three individual units totalling $750 because our house has three zones. It seems like there should be a system for multiple zones where one thermostat is the brains of the system and the other ones are just control knob relays... but no, Nest's solution is simply 'buy more, they'll all work together!'

Actually, a bit of googling and it looks like the Irish-made Climote is designed to support multiple zones in a sensible way, but doesn't seem to be supported outside of Ireland.

[TheGrimm]

I have a hard time wrapping my head around how a NEST can be any better than my cheap dollar 7-day programmable thermostats.

- I have to spend time "training" my NEST
+ I programmed my thermostats in 5-10 minutes
- NEST can tell when you are away - My wife works from home and would continually trigger NEST. Not to mention the fact she would probably fuss with the temperature all the time.
+ Programmable is set and forget. If I go on vacation I can override them in a couple of minutes.

[ken0042]

Originally Posted by calgarywinning

You need to get rid of the electricity in your garage and run a gasoline. Electrical heating is outrageous compared to gas.

I assume you mean natural gas; not gasoline.

Yes, I looked at the cost difference when making my decision. The setup costs are what killed it for me. Seeing as I was running 60 amp power to the garage no matter what; the cost difference between setting up for electric heat vs. gas was several hundred vs. a couple of thousand. The heating cost for my garage stands at about $100-150 per year, so even if gas was 1/4 the cost- it would take me decades to break even.

[kermitology]

I have an Ecobee.. I don't recommend it. I wish it had an "auto" setting that would flip between heat and cooling (we have geothermal). Despite knowing the forecast it doesn't seem to do a very good job of reacting to the temperature changes.