Analog thermostats may be contributing to a higher than necessary power bill, according to an NB Power Energy Advisor.
Brent Lockhart says analog devices can be poorly calibrated, which may have a dramatic impact on your power bill as he explains.
“If it’s 20 in the room, and I’ll just use easy numbers, if it clicks at 10, well that’s where that thermostat thinks 20 is, so it’s miscalibrated by 10 degrees,” says Lockhart. “If you put it on 20, where everyone is comfortable, you’re really in that situation in my example where you’re going to heat the room to 30.”
He says a second concern relating to overheating comes when you turn the analog thermostat to zero “in a perfect world they would be set at zero, but in that case, in shoulder seasons you’ll still be heating the room to 10 degrees based on the miscalibration, I mean, it could be 2, 5, 10, 15 degrees, whatever [the calibration is].”
Lockhart says analog thermostats can be inaccurate, on average, by as much as four to five degrees.
He explains programmable thermostats can help you reduce power consumption by automatically adjusting the temperature.
“Maybe start in the most common areas, if you get programmable ones you can do like the bathrooms and kitchens that you want up to certain temperature when you get up,” says Lockhart. “Maybe bring it up at 6:30 to 20 and you get out of bed and shower and stuff and you have it turned back down to 15 when you leave for work, and you could do that with your kitchen and your bathroom.”
Lockhart cautions replacing all your thermostats with programmable digital ones can be costly, so he recommends doing them as you can afford to, while taking advantage of NB Power’s Fall rebate.
