How much will I save with a programmable thermostat?
By Joel S. Gilbert, P.E., CEO
Seems like a simple question, right? Wrong! Do some research and you will find that you simply can't answer this question with any level of precision. What good is an answer like 5-15%? Five to fifteen percent of what? You might wonder, when the computation of that answer didn't take into consideration what temperature settings you were going to use and for what time periods. With so little information, how can a simple percentage-reduction in your overall energy cost be a good savings guide?
Most customers who have programmable thermostats don't use their features. As we've heard many times, "Tell me what I'll save. Then I'll decide if it's worth taking time to install, program and deal with the changed settings." Customers also wonder if they just manually reset their home's temperature when they go to sleep, wake-up, leave, come home, etc. are they going to save anything more if they had a programmable thermostat?
Because we believe thermostat control is an important part of our nation's prudent use of energy, APOGEE is launching an online application to help residential and commercial customers find out how much they can really expect to save with these devices.
Click on the link below to see this highly intuitive "programmable thermostat simulator" in its beta-test format. Move the dials for the time settings of your comfort decisions and what you feel you can achieve as workable settings.You can also easily indicate different settings for the weekday vs. weekends, just like programmable thermostats offer. You can set the temperature for each time period independently, and when you
| Try the new programmable thermostat module! |
think you have it about right, just note the resulting effective average temperature as shown in the box at the bottom.
By the way, doing all of this has the added customer-education advantage of teaching how to program these thermostats. The real things are not that different!
You can now enter this effective number into APOGEE's online energy calculator to predict the home or business energy-use and costs and see how much these set-back decisions will save. You can change the temperature settings (comfort decisions), recalculate the effective temperature, run that as a scenario, and within seconds construct the full range of comfort decisions worth considering.
Please take a few moments and try this for yourself and give us some feedback. Once customers see that the savings are significant, you can bet they will take advantage of this convenient technology.
This new programmable thermostat module is part of our ongoing initiative to evolve our HomeEnergyCalculator™ and keep it on the cutting edge of what is possible with online energy analysis. Current HomeEnergyCalculator customers will have the option of adding this optional energy feature to their calculator by request.