is it more efficient to turn off your heat or to turn it down when going to sleep/leaving your home for long periods of time?
In: Technology
Heater is usually an on/off switch controlled by a thermostat.
Basically it runs this computer code in a loop:
“`
IF current_temp < set_point
THEN turn_heater_on()
ELSE turn_heater_off()
“`
Say you keep your thermostat at 70 when you’re awake, and 60 when you’re asleep.
If it takes your house 15 hours to cool down from 70 degrees (F) to 60 degrees, there’s no difference between turning down to 60 vs turning it off when you sleep (assuming you’re a normal human who sleeps for less than 15 hours a night).
Think of it this way: Option 1, turn it off. Option 2, tell the computer to turn it off as long as it’s above 60 degrees, but it never actually gets below 60 degrees.
There’s a big benefit to turning it down instead. If you’re in an area where it gets below freezing in the wintertime, setting the heater to a low value keeps pipes from freezing, if you’re unexpectedly away longer than planned.
How long it takes your house to cool down depends on a lot of factors: Outside temperature, size of your house, insulation, windows, opening / closing of doors.
Nowadays you can get a thermostat that you can set to change temperature based on time of day, or even lets you control remotely from your smartphone (so for example if you’re running errands and don’t know when you’ll be back, when you’re done with your errands and ready to head home, you could use your phone to tell it to turn up the heat.)
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