The downside of this is that that many of them are still doing it “the old fashioned way”…manually…and sometimes they forget... waking up in the morning to a cooler than normal house in the winter or possibly forgetting to adjust the thermostat (during any season) when they leave the house.

     This can easily be corrected by installing a programmable, or clock thermostat. In addition to lowering temperatures while you sleep, it also raises the temperatures again before you get out from under the covers in the morning. It not only sounds good, it's even more cost-effective too. Plus there are several other additional benefits.

     For a programmable thermostats can not only be used to drop the house temperature during the night and then automatically raise it again in the morning, it can do the same thing whenever your home is unoccupied. For example, it can adjust the temperature several times during the day to accommodate work schedules. Separate and different settings are available for weekends. No wonder then that Home Energy magazine reports savings in excess of 20% with two eight-hour setbacks of 10°F each.

     As in most things, electronic setback thermostats come in a variety of prices…anywhere from $100.00 to $300.00 . If you have a heat pump or central air conditioning for example, make sure the thermostat is designed for heating and cooling. And while installation is relatively simple for a basic control, if connecting wires is “not your thing” or makes you jittery, having a heating technician do it for you, is still a worthwhile investment.

     Note too, that the energy savings from a programmable thermostat will depend on how much it reduces the room temperature and for how long. In an average house, you might save 1 to 2 percent of your annual heating cost for each degree of setback maintained over a 24-hour period. Multiply that by 365 days and you can see that it will amount to a substantial savings without any decrease in comfort.

     And this final note about this modest device that we take for granted but that controls the comfort of your family on the coldest day in January and the hottest day in July. There is a common misconception about set back thermostats. The myth, that a furnace works harder than normal to warm the space back to a comfortable temperature after the thermostat has been set back, resulting in little or no savings.

     This misconception has been dispelled by years of research and numerous studies. The fuel required to reheat a building to a comfortable temperature is roughly equal to the fuel saved, as the building drops to the lower temperature. You save fuel between the time that the temperature stabilizes at the lower level and the next time heat is needed. So, the longer your house remains at the lower temperature, the more energy you save.

    Another misconception is that the higher you raise a thermostat, the more heat the furnace will put out, or that the house will warm up faster if the thermostat is raised higher. Furnaces put out the same amount of heat no matter how high the thermostat is set—the variable is how long it must stay on to reach the set temperature.

It’s your family’s health and it is you, the homeowner, who pays the bill.