[don-code]

My experience has been that it's easy to say, "oh, it's just me", but much harder to subject someone you care about to the same standard that you would yourself. I'm in a similar position with the thermostat, even though something we initially bonded over was that we both kept our thermostats at a low temperature that was outside the window of being socially acceptable.

[takinola]

In the winter, I keep the thermostat at frigid temperatures when I am home alone and jack it up to warm just before any one else gets home. My thinking is that it is wasteful to warm up the entire house when it's just me since I can put on a sweater but I don't want to subject others to my, shall we say, quirks.

I keep meaning to calculate how much I am actually saving by freezing my butt off. My guess is it'll work out to something like $0.75 a day or something equally trivial.

[adrianN]

Depending on the kind of heating system you have and the temperature differences you talk about it can be cheaper to heat the house to a constant temperature (because your heating can run more efficiently under lower load).

[SoftTalker]

I once got a programmable thermostat and went through the trouble to set it up for the times we were normally at home and away, and my energy bills went up.

Now I just set a temperature that everyone can tolerate and I forget about it.

[wallst07]

Correct, or the people doing this for environmental reasons... it's probably not better to do this. It would be better spending money on better insulation (assuming it isn't up to date).

[quickthrowman]

It probably costs more to do that than to maintain a constant temperature. When you turn the setpoint down, everything inside your house and also your house itself starts losing heat. When you turn the setpoint back up, the cooled off house and items inside of it will suck up most of the heat until the stuff is warm again, and then the air warms up.

This is much more noticeable when you go into a freezing cold building and turn on the thermostat, it takes almost an entire day to heat up the stuff and building.

[sokoloff]

Thermodynamically, the heat lost to the outside is roughly linear with the temperature delta between inside and outside.

All else equal, setbacks do reduce energy lost to the outside; whether that saves money depends somewhat on the recovery strategy of your equipment; whether it’s desirable depends on your individual preferences.