We keep ours at 55 all the time except from 7-9 pm. We are even still hot at night, and no one is home during the day, so it works for us. We have a small bathroom heater to run for 30 minutes in the morning.

I have the same paranoia when I wake up and the furnace is running, like this morning, because that means it was below 55 in the house!

Thanks for contributing this post to this week’s Carnival of Family Life which I am hosting! It is a valuable addition to the Carnival because many folks will relate.

Have you considered hosting the Carnival one week?

Blessings to you and yours this Thanksgiving weekend.

Boomie’s right; if you turn the temp down, everything in the house cools to the lower temp….say 58, or wherever you put it. So you’re not only having to raise the ambient air temp, but also the temp of the objects in the house…ie, your furniture, tile, sheetrock, etc. This takes much longer than just raising air temperature.

Re your programmable thermostat: most of them have a swing of about 3 degrees….you need to play around with yours to find out just how big the swing is. I’ve had them up to 5 degrees. The swing is the variation off of what you’ve set it at–so if you keep your furnace set on 64, the temp could vary in your house by a range of several degrees, with 64 in the middle. So….it might warm to more than 64, but not kick on till it was well below that. It doesn’t hold at a constant 64.

Rather than shooting for a particular temperature, I try to monitor how many times per hour the furnace kicks on, and for how long it runs each time. On a really cold day(by my south Louisiana standards, and with a serious lack of insulation) the furnace might kick on as often as every 10 minutes. I try to hold it to once or twice an hour; if I’m really cold, say, in the bathroom, or while working at my desk, I use a small ceramic heater to warm just the area I’m in. I’ve found that’s far cheaper than heating the whole house, and doesn’t dry my skin nearly as badly, either.

I slowly edged the heat in our house down; I keep it at about 62 to maaaaaybe 64 during the day, if it’s really cold out, and turn it down to about 57 or 58 at night, because I like it flat out cold in the house to sleep. (My husband starts looking for snow when the temps fall below 70, though) At 70 in the house, I’d have a constant migraine…but when my parents come over, I do boost the temp for them. Right now, it’s 42 out and I have my bedroom window cracked open a bit…and we usually have a door wide open, as well.

Stay warm!

Brandon I am all about the sacrifice now to have a better tomorrow… I think. Until I get chilly.

I applaud your effort, but I would never want the temperature only one degree above unbearably cold. Of course, I *hate* being cold. From the same point, I can put up with heat easily.

Of course my wife is the opposite. She hates being hot and does not mind being chilly.