3 Handy Thermostat Tips To Help You Save On Your Energy Bills

The onset of winter weather means that we’re all looking to our heating and cooling systems to keep us comfortable and productive throughout the festive season, and our thermostats play a huge part in that. As a general rule, our energy bills tend to rise higher anyway in the winter, making efficiency more of a priority than ever. With that in mind, it’s useful to know three of the most common mistakes people make when setting their thermostat, and how you can avoid making them!

To save on your winter heating bill, you should avoid:

1. Adjusting the thermostat in response to outside temperatures
2. Setting it too high in an attempt to heat the room more quickly
3. Keeping it running constantly on low settings

So now you know what everyone else is doing – why should you avoid doing it yourself?

Adjusting The Thermostat When It’s Cold Outside

It might be tempting to try and pre-empt the chilly weather from penetrating the walls, but remember the main job of a thermostat is to regulate the temperature inside the building, rather than respond to what’s going on outside. Temperatures outside can sometimes affect how you feel indoors, but there’s no guarantee – which means that you might find yourself expending more energy on rising indoor temperatures that aren’t actually doing anything but making you feel uncomfortable.

Setting Higher Temperatures To Heat The Room More Quickly

If you’ve come in from a hard day at work, or a long walk outside, it can take a little while for the biting chill of the weather to dissipate. In that time, it might seem like a good idea to set the thermostat up to a higher temperature, so that it works harder and is therefore faster to reach the lower ones. The only problem is that a thermostat doesn’t work like that! It’s not like electric scooters accelerating – the thermostat only sets the final temperature, not the speed of heating. That means that it could be using valuable energy to heat the building to, let’s face it, an undesirable temperature. Instead, just set it to the temperature you want, and you’ll find that it’s probably not actually all that long until it hits it.

Keeping The Heating On Constantly Rather Than Turning It On And Off

Quite a large proportion of the British population believe that it’s better to have the heating on a low setting constantly, rather than turning it on and off periodically. Unfortunately, this isn’t true! As we touched upon in the point above, the system uses the same amount of energy to change temperature every time, so all that’s happening by keeping it on constantly is that you’re spending energy to heat an empty or sleeping house, to no positive final effect.

These all sound like little things in theory – and indeed, they are! – but you might be surprised at how much of an effect they can ultimately have on your energy bills. According to an official estimate, turning your thermostat down by even one degree could save you, on average, around £90 a year. It just goes to show!

Here at Askews, we’re staffed by an expert team of engineers all well-versed in the workings of heating and cooling systems, which puts us in a perfect position to offer a quality service to you, our customers. You can click here to get a free quote, or just give us a call on 01282 863 825.

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