Programmable thermostat

[Hwyl]

I might upgrade to one. I have FHW and live alone.

Has anyone had any good luck or more importantly bad luck with them.

I know some can be tough to program.

[botebum]

Had one in a house I used to share with some guys about 8 yrs ago. Worked great. House would cool down/warm up during the day while we were all gone to work and heat up/cool down just before we started coming in from work. We figured it saved us quite a bit of money over time.

Doug

[Bruce Hooke]

I have a basic programmable thermostat and I love it. Programming it did take a little while to figure out, but it is not really that complicated -- it is the kind of thing where if you have problems with things like digital watches or VCR's then you'll likely have problems with a programmable thermostat too. Similarly, they only really make sense if you have the kind of logical turn of mind that will allow you to make good use of it. They also make less sense if your schedule is highly variable.

I find that a programmable thermostat is especially useful for hot water systems because such systems tend to be slow to respond to thermostat changes. So, I can set my programmable thermostat to turn the temperature up an hour or two before I wake up so that it is at least reasonably warm once I get up.

The one downfall I can think of is that because I almost never have to think about the thermostat setting it is easy for me to forget to do things like turn it down before I go away for the weekend.

[Norman Bernstein]

I went through perhaps a half-dozen of them in the first 25 years of owning the house I live in. They were all types bought from the usual sources, like Home Depot, Lowes, and the hardware stores that existed before the first two drove the independents vitually out of business.

They semed to all be uniformly unreliable.

About 5 years ago, we had to have the a/c system replaced (it's part of my forced hot air system), and the contractor supplied a Honeywell programmable thermostat... one unlike any I've seen in the stores. Perhaps it's only available to professionals? In any event, it's been highly reliable.

[Bruce Hooke]

For whatever it is worth, the programmable thermostat in my house looks like a hardware store variety and it was installed before I moved into this house 8 years ago and so far it has been reliable...

[LeeG]

for heating it works great,,drop the temp at night and during the day. But you can't run the ac the same way.

[Nicholas Carey]

Get one made by Honeywell Controls. Work great.

Look at the feature sets: some support only a single schedule, others support two (weekday/weekend) and some support 7 schedules. Also look at the number of set points allowed in each schedule.

BTW, whether or not the programmable thermostate supports AC as well is dependent on the thermostat. Ours, a Honeywell RTH6300B. It supports a/c just fine.

[ 02-09-2006, 08:26 PM: Message edited by: Nicholas Carey ]

[LeeG]

what I meant was that the AC unit couldn't pull heat out as well as the furnace could put it in. So if I tried the same on/off energy savings it ended up making the AC run even longer trying to cool the place off after it heated up.

[Katherine]

I have one of the Honeywell programables. Works great.