With the prospect of substantially higher heating costs this winter, I decided it's time to conserve energy. We haven't started our caulking campaign yet, but I installed a couple of Honeywell CT3200 programmable thermostats today that I bought on sale last night at The Home Depot (yeah, they prefer it with the word "the" included in the name). Normally $49.97, but on sale for $32.78. Hey, I'm saving money already.
We needed two thermostats because our big old (c1903) Queen Anne Victorian house has two furnaces and two air conditioning units - one pair for downstairs and the other for upstairs. It's a consequence of retrofitting a house that was built before there was forced-air heating. While it gives me twice the number of furnace filters to change, it also allows for a bit more fine tuning when it comes to managing our energy resources.
Since we don't spend much time downstairs on weekdays - briefly for breakfast and then again from about 6-11 p.m., I'm programming the downstairs to maintain 68 degrees when we're there and 58 degrees when we're not.
I spend much of my day in our upstairs office, so we'll maintain 68 degrees from about 6:30 a.m. til 11 p.m. and 58 or 60 while we're asleep.
The changeover was simple - just yank the old thermostats off of the wall, remove the color-coded wires from them, mount the baseplates for the new units, reconnect the wires, snap on the new units, pop in some AA batteries and set the time and programs.
At the end of the 2004-05 heating season, we had piled up about $250 worth of credit with our natural gas supplier by paying on the budget plan. So when it began to cool off again, I took us off of the budget plan and we've had two months with no gas payment while we use up the credit. Unless the weather goes to hell soon, the December bill should be little or nothing as well.
Then, armed with the programmable thermostats, we'll take on the winter heating season.
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