DaveinOlyWA said:
TonyWilliams said:
cwerdna said:
PG&E is just a ripoff. Despite me living like an Eskimo at home... One time I woke up and saw the thermostat reading 49 degrees.
Ya... that's a bit silly, unless you are on your last dollar, starving.
I'll be they sell solar panels up there in your great white north.
no its not. what we fail to realize is that a room temp of 60º OR LESS is common in many places in Europe. I keep mine that low and its not due to cost, its due to reducing my footprint. (if I did keep it higher in Winter, it would only add about $50-70 a month)
we will have ANY detrimental health effect from a temperature that is quite frankly, not that low. What we are conditioned to is what determines our perception of cold and in my area, room temps set in the mid to low 60's is quite common
From David Mackay's fantastic book "Sustainable Energy without the Hot Air":
"The thermostat (accompanied by woolly jumpers) is hard to beat, when it
comes to value-for-money technology. You turn it down, and your building
uses less energy. Magic! In Britain, for every degree that you turn the
thermostat down, the heat loss decreases by about 10%. Turning the ther-
mostat down from 20 °C to 15 °C would nearly halve the heat loss. Thanks
to incidental heat gains by the building, the savings in heating power will
be even bigger than these reductions in heat loss.
"Unfortunately, however, this remarkable energy-saving technology has
side-effects. Some humans call turning the thermostat down a lifestyle
change, and are not happy with it. I’ll make some suggestions later about
how to sidestep this lifestyle issue. . . ."
"So, my main tip is cunning thermostat management. What’s a reason-
able thermostat setting to aim for? Nowadays many people seem to think
that 17 °C is unbearably cold. However, the average winter-time tempera-
ture in British houses in 1970 was 13 °C*! A human’s perception of whether
they feel warm depends on what they are doing, and what they’ve been
doing for the last hour or so. My suggestion is, don’t think in terms of a ther-
mostat setting. Rather than fixing the thermostat to a single value, try just
leaving it at a really low value most of the time (say 13 or 15 °C), and turn
it up temporarily whenever you feel cold. It’s like the lights in a library.
If you allow yourself to ask the question “what is the right light level in
the bookshelves?” then you’ll no doubt answer “bright enough to read the
book titles,” and you’ll have bright lights on all the time. But that question
presumes that we have to fix the light level; and we don’t have to. We can
fit light switches that the reader can turn on, and that switch themselves
off again after an appropriate time. Similarly, thermostats don’t need to be
left up at 20 °C all the time."
*13 deg. C is 55.4 deg. F. Those Brits were a hardy bunch, but then what can you expect from a generation that grew up taking cold baths :lol: See
http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c21/page_140.shtml" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false; et. seq. for more.