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| Stormin Mormon... |
 Posted: Thu Oct 29, 2009 6:23 am |
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Please forgive me while I troll for a moment.....
Is it energy saving to turn the thermostat down, when
leaving the house? I mean, the furnace has to run to catch
up when I get home. I have a way of looking at the matter.
I'll explain my point of view after the argument is
underway.
--
Christopher A. Young
Learn more about Jesus
www.lds.org
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| Mike Terry... |
| Posted: Thu Oct 29, 2009 2:02 pm |
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"Stormin Mormon" <cayoung61**spamblock## at (no spam) hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:hcc1gv$8fq$1 at (no spam) news.eternal-september.org...
Quote: Please forgive me while I troll for a moment.....
Is it energy saving to turn the thermostat down, when
leaving the house? I mean, the furnace has to run to catch
up when I get home. I have a way of looking at the matter.
I'll explain my point of view after the argument is
underway.
The furnace only has to run to replace heat that's been lost, and the higher
the house temperature the more heat will be lost. So I would say it's
energy saving to turn the thermostat down.
Mike. |
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| Andrew Erickson... |
| Posted: Thu Oct 29, 2009 8:28 pm |
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In article <hcc1gv$8fq$1 at (no spam) news.eternal-september.org>,
"Stormin Mormon" <cayoung61**spamblock## at (no spam) hotmail.com> wrote:
Quote: Please forgive me while I troll for a moment.....
Is it energy saving to turn the thermostat down, when
leaving the house? I mean, the furnace has to run to catch
up when I get home. I have a way of looking at the matter.
I'll explain my point of view after the argument is
underway.
Yes, in very nearly all cases (with the exceptions listed below). Heat
loss from the house is greater when the difference between the interior
and exterior temperatures is greater, and so maintaining the temperature
at a more elevated level will lead to greater heat loss and thus require
more heating from the furnace.
The obvious exception is when it's summer and the furnace would not have
come on anyway, where the nonexistent savings are kind of a moot point.
One other possible exception is with some heat pump systems, where the
heat source (typically an underground run of pipes) can get temporarily
depleted if called upon to provide a large amount of heat quickly, and
so the heating up afterwards may possibly use more energy (as the
efficiency goes down) than maintaining a steady state temperature. I'm
not sure that such systems are commonly referred to as furnaces, though.
I guess a similar exception could occur for other heating systems where
the steady-state operating efficiency decreases with continued
operation. However, I can't think of any other common systems where
this is expected to be the case, assuming proper installation and
operation.
--
Andrew Erickson
"He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot
lose." -- Jim Elliot |
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| dgates... |
| Posted: Sun Nov 22, 2009 12:35 pm |
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On Thu, 29 Oct 2009 08:23:39 -0400, "Stormin Mormon"
<cayoung61**spamblock## at (no spam) hotmail.com> wrote:
Quote: Please forgive me while I troll for a moment.....
Is it energy saving to turn the thermostat down, when
leaving the house? I mean, the furnace has to run to catch
up when I get home. I have a way of looking at the matter.
I'll explain my point of view after the argument is
underway.
I have had this exact same thought: How much energy does it really
save to just turn the thermostat down "for a while," but then it has
to catch up?
Usually, when I wonder about cases that are hard to measure in small
quantities, I increase them to huge quantities to see how they look
then.
What if I went away, not for 8 hours or so, but for a year? (And we
can even say that the weather outside stays exactly the same for the
whole year.) Of course, I'd turn the heater off, let the house get
colder, and then re-heat it when I got home.
Assuming the house isn't 100% perfectly insulated, I'm pretty sure
this reasoning applies when leaving for an 8-hour day as well.
That said, there still might be something to be said for incurring
some wasted expense in keeping the heater going while you're gone, so
that you don't have to put up with the vents blowing hot air on you
for the first hour that you get home. |
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