thermostats need work

i spent many years in the music business, and in that world, life is very much like that of an olympic athlete, you have to constantly challenge and test and push yourself all the time. Pity the rest of the world doesn't work this way.

Like most folks, I have a thermostat in my house. Like every other modern electronic thermostat, it has various timed settings so it automatically turns the heat up and down at different times of the day. You can get different thermostats that have slightly better this or that but basically they all operate in this manner.

Here's the thing: if I want to REALLY save energy, at bedtime I will (like many people) turn the heat way way down, to like 50 degrees. It takes a few hours for the house to get down to that temperature. Then, when it falls to 49 degrees, (usually at 4 am), the thermostat says, uh oh, time to bring the house back to 50 degrees.

So what happens? because the house and all the water in the heating system has become stone cold, the furnace has to run like mad to bring the house up just one degree. It does that, of course, but to do so it has a to run a long time. the house reaches 50 degrees, but by the time the heat gets to the thermostat, the system has built up a huge amount of residual energy. that huge amount of heat has to dissipate, which quickly brings the house (or some rooms in it, like my bedroom) up to 70 degrees.

It would be simple enough to solve this problem by having a time limit on how long a furnace would run in the early am hours, thereby making the rise in temperature more gradual and efficient. this is easily programmable. but the engineers have only thought within the box and said "the thermostat will turn on the heat until the thermostat feels heat." To the engineers who make and sell these things, i say, Sorry guys, you met your own standard of performance, but compared to what is possible to do, it's not much.

as we say in the music biz, "thank you-- NEXT!"