October 29th, 2008 - I won! I won! I won!
When I went to bed last night, Eric decided he couldn’t stand another 6 hours (he goes to bed at 2-3am or so; me ~8:30) at 58 degrees or lower. So he turned the heat on. I WON! For the first time in years, possibly ever, I WON THE HEAT CHALLENGE.
Must say it was much nicer to get up this morning in a 63 degree house. Have to figure out our new thermostat a bit better; it was 63 by the time I got downstairs, and I highly doubt it was 63 all night (but maybe) and it kicked in for the 7am 67 degrees by 6:20 (that is, it’s set for 67 degrees at 7am but by 6:30 it had already heated up the house to that temp). It has a feature (which I can turn off) where it will learn how long it takes to heat/cool the house to a given temperature and then turn on the right amount of time before the setting so that at the given time, it’s that warm. I’m not used to that and the times are set more for when we want the heat to kick in. Have to figure out what times will work–plus it’s learning how long the house takes to heat. (By the way, I use “house” loosely since the upstairs is usually at least 5 degrees cooler, maybe even more, since heat doesn’t circulate very well and half the upstairs has no vents.)
Speaking of which: Last winter, I learned we had the wrong thermostat–we have a 2-stage furnace but had a 1-stage thermostat. I finally got around to buying a new thermostat this past month. I ordered it the day before we had the heating folks come in for the annual furnace checkup. Eric mentioned it to him, thankfully. He looked at things and said that we’d need two wires run up to the thermostat. One for the dual stage part and one so that the battery was backup instead of constant (not necessary, but nice and cheaper probably). We *could* do that ourselves, except that’s totally not in our abilities.
Boy was I mad when Eric told me about this. I was already mad at the original installers for putting in the wrong thermostat, then to find out they didn’t even run the proper wires. And to top it off, the furnace guy took a look at some other things and found they also hadn’t changed the presets on the furnace blower, so our AC unit thought we had a 3000 sq ft house (it’s half that)! (Might effect the furnace as well, but it was put in terms of the AC so I don’t know.) For 6 years we’ve been running our furnace and AC wrong!
Here’s hoping the the new thermostat and changes to the furnace will keep our bills lower…or if not the bills, the therms used (since rates are higher than they used to be).
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.