How to Save Energy When Setting the Thermostat

Video Transcript

"Hi I'm Tim Gipson and I'm going to talk to you about how to save energy by setting your thermostat. Now if you have a manual thermostat one thing to keep in mind when you are looking at your temperature controls, a 2 to 3 degree drop in temperature or setting your temperature 2 or 3 degrees lower say in the Winter or 2 or 3 degrees higher in the Summer can save 15 to 20% in your utility bills so just by keeping it a little bit warmer in the Summer and a little bit cooler in the Winter you can do a lot and also the things that we can do with a manual one is that whenever we are going to be out of the space is set those back to a lower temperature. Now keep in mind that your HVAC system if you set it back too far is going to have to work that much harder to either cool or heat your house so usually if you set back about 7 or 8 degrees at the most that will be adequate for saving some energy while you are not going to be in the space but if you go too low it is going to take a lot more energy to catch your house back up when you come back home. Now an excellent way to make sure that you save the most energy on setting a thermostat is to go with something like this. This is a programmable thermostat which gives you a, in this case this one has a week day program and a weekend program and it has four individual settings so we can go through and in this case we can automatically set the system to set back in the Winter at a lower temperature at night but before we are going to be up and down and in the downstairs area then it can be set where the temperature will raise up 3 or 4 degrees to help warm up the downstairs and then again after everybody has gone to school and everybody has gone to work it automatically sets back down so that while you are not here. So these typically can run you anywhere from $30 to $70 but by putting a programmable thermostat in you can literally save hundreds of dollars every season by utilizing one of these so really the best way to control your heat and save money on your heating or cooling is to use a programmable thermostat. I'm Tim Gipson and that's how to set your thermostat."