Latest / Shafer Heating and Cooling Service Repair Podcast / What Temperature Should I Set My Thermostat?

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What Temperature Should I Set My Thermostat? · Shafer Heating and Cooling Service Repair Podcast

• 0:01
  I've got Nathan Shafer a good friend of mine from Shafer Heating and
• 0:04
  Cooling joining me here on the checker pro radio show as
• 0:07
  an hvac expert hello nathan how
• 0:10
  are you hey doing great jim how are you i am doing well thank you so much this
• 0:16
  question comes up a lot i'm sure it comes up a lot in your world as well what
• 0:20
  temperature should i set my thermostat to good question yeah so um Great question.
• 0:29
  No really, I would say no temperatures for, hey, this is the magical number, right?
• 0:35
  This is where you should set it. I think more importantly would be is let's
• 0:40
  not change it up and down a lot.
• 0:43
  Okay. And so it's better. It's more comfortable. It's better for the home or
• 0:48
  the business, the structure.
• 0:50
  It's better for the utility bill.
• 0:52
  It's better all around. It's better for the equipment. It's easier for it.
• 0:56
  If we pick a temperature that we find is most comfortable for us,
• 0:59
  I would say on average, it would probably be around 70-ish.
• 1:03
  You'll see houses are from 68 to 72 to four, probably most commonly,
• 1:08
  depending on the season and time of the year and different things, maybe warmer.
• 1:12
  However, let's set a temperature and let's maintain that temperature.
• 1:16
  Picture your car. If we're stop and go traffic in town and we're constantly
• 1:22
  braking and accelerating, braking and accelerating.
• 1:25
  It's tough on that vehicle. It's hard on the brakes. It's worse on fuel mileage.
• 1:31
  It's a lot of extra wear and tear.
• 1:34
  Heck, it's more wear and tear on you, the driver, right? Just going.
• 1:37
  If you set that cruise and you get out there and just set it on 60...
• 1:41
  Uh, man, that thing, you can run it for way more miles, less wear and tear, much simpler.
• 1:47
  Uh, and that, and that's going to run better that way. So your system is no different.
• 1:52
  Um, another thing too, that can kind of play with what temperature feels the
• 1:56
  most comfortable to you is going to be the relative humidity in the home.
• 2:00
  So what is that humidity level in the home? And certain, uh,
• 2:04
  times of the year, you know, around here, we may need to dehumidify the air.
• 2:08
  So come spring, summer, fall.
• 2:10
  We need more dehumidification. In the wintertime, as we heat our homes,
• 2:14
  we dry out that space. And so we need to add humidity to the air.
• 2:18
  And so you might find that if you're finding like, man, 70 sometimes feels comfortable.
• 2:23
  And then other times it's freezing cold in the wintertime or vice versa in the summer, right?
• 2:28
  Man, I got to keep turning it down. 70, I'm sweating. But the other couple of
• 2:32
  weeks ago or a month ago, 70 felt really good. It was almost chilly in here.
• 2:35
  That's because of the humidity level in the house. So for every 5% in relative
• 2:43
  humidity change in the home, that feels like one degree of temperature to the skin.
• 2:48
  And so that's extremely important. And there's ways that we can control that
• 2:51
  humidity with your heating cooling system, with whole house humidifiers and
• 2:56
  dehumidifiers to help once again, keep that comfortable and allow you to be
• 3:00
  able to pick a temperature, give a degree or two, right?
• 3:03
  And just set it and let it maintain i was
• 3:06
  thinking when you were talking about humidity in the home especially in the
• 3:10
  summertime a lot of us will use our central air conditioning system to dehumidify
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  that's one of the things it does right it's it's important though that the cycling on and off.
• 3:25
  Is programmed properly and that the system is sized properly, right?
• 3:31
  Because if it cools down too quickly, but hasn't had enough time to pull the
• 3:35
  humidity out, that's not good.
• 3:38
  And that's why it's so important to have Schaefer come out and take a look at
• 3:42
  everything to make sure that the product that you have that is cooling your
• 3:47
  home is sized right, for instance,
• 3:50
  and that it's cycling on and off properly.
• 3:54
  But I will give you a tip as a homeowner in the summer.
• 3:58
  If it's hot and it's humid,
• 4:02
  Keep your AC running to pull that humidity out if you do not have a dehumidifier,
• 4:08
  which most people generally don't have.
• 4:11
  And a lot of people will say, well, it's cool enough in here,
• 4:14
  but it's sticky. There's a problem, right?
• 4:18
  Absolutely. Yeah. And oftentimes, too, there may be like, well,
• 4:22
  hey, well, I'm at work, right? Or I'm going to be gone for the weekend.
• 4:25
  I'm going to say in the summertime, for example, I'm going to turn it way up.
• 4:28
  I'm not going to be here. Why condition? I'm not here.
• 4:30
  And or the wintertime, you know, set it way back. Well, the problem is that's
• 4:34
  harder on a lot of things in the home.
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  You know, your doors start sticking, your floor starts squeaking,
• 4:39
  you know, it comes to humidity and humidity because of expansion and contraction.
• 4:43
  But also too, now when you do come back home and you turn it back down or turn
• 4:46
  it back up, you know, the time of the year, man, that system has to work so hard to get there.
• 4:50
  It's like jumping in your car and just pushing a full throttle, right?
• 4:53
  For the next hundred miles and wonder why you just got 10 miles less of the gallon or whatever.
• 4:58
  So very, very hard on the system as well as the well-being of your home.
• 5:04
  Even things like instruments, your flooring, all these different things in the
• 5:09
  home, we don't even think about your furniture.
• 5:11
  It's really crucial for all of that, not just our comfort because you think, well, I'm not home.
• 5:17
  Yeah, but everything else is still there unless you're packing up and taking
• 5:19
  it all with you, which probably not the case.
• 5:22
  I agree. Some people will spend extra money to actually store their belongings
• 5:26
  in a climate controlled storage facility.
• 5:29
  Right. Um, you know, maybe not so much in parts of California,
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  but in other parts of the country where it's, uh,
• 5:36
  really cold, really hot, really humid, people will do that, but you wouldn't
• 5:40
  want the owner of that facility turning the AC system off for the fine artwork
• 5:44
  you may have stored in there.
• 5:45
  Why would you do that at home? It's exactly what Nathan's talking about.
• 5:48
  Um, you know, we have a lot of expensive things we've invested in inside our
• 5:52
  home and just because we're not there you want to make sure that your belongings
• 5:57
  especially your pets i mean come on right leave fido at home and you want to
• 6:02
  make sure fido is comfortable nathan as always thank you so much for joining
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  me today here on the program,
• 6:09
  hey thank you for having me jim it was good seeing you all of nathan's information
• 6:13
  is located in the description of this podcast there's no excuse not to reach out to him and his team.