@Home: t-stats

According to the Energy Star, the average household spends more than $2,200 a year on energy bills - nearly half of which goes to heating and cooling. Homeowners can save about $180 a year by properly setting their programmable thermostats (t-stats) and maintaining those settings.

A programmable t-stat helps make it easy for you to save by offering four pre-programmed settings to regulate your home's temperature in both summer and winter - when you are home, asleep, or away.

The pre-programmed settings that come with programmable t-stats are intended to deliver savings without sacrificing comfort. Depending on your family's schedule, you can see significant savings by sticking with those settings or adjust them as appropriate for your family. 

The key is to establish a program that automatically reduces heating and cooling in your home when you don't need as much. Use the programmable thermostat calculator to see what you can save with set-back temperatures that work for your family. The pre-programmed settings for a programmable thermostat are:

So lets see how I am doing...

So on the cooling side I left it as-is out of the box.  On the heating side I was a little more aggressive staying just under the higher set-points.  My family is home all day with these temperatures and typically are very comfortable.  

There are certainly days when we use the override feature to take the edge off.  What is great about the override is at the next scheduled time it returns to the program.  So if you bump up heating at 8pm by a couple degrees, it will not run all night at the higher temperature, it drops back down to the Sleep setting at 10pm.  The t-stat I have also allows you to program weekends different than weekdays.  Quite often we are out during the day on weekends so our set-points are more aggressive assuming we are out.  If   we are home, again the override allows you to make a temporary adjustment for comfort.

I have two zones, one upstairs and one downstairs.  So I get even more aggressive with these set-points upstairs for afternoons and evenings when upstairs is seldom used.