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Green Nesties, maybe you can answer some questions for me
There are a couple of things I have heard of to conserve energy lately and I don't get them. They are common things that lots of people talk about and they don't make sense to me. I may just be being dumb about it but could you explain it to me?
1. How does lowering your interior temperature at night or when you leave the house conserve fuel? If you keep your house at say 70 degrees and you lower it to 65 at night or when you leave, then doesn't your furnace have to work harder to warm your house up again when you get home? If your house is going to drop a degree in temperature cause it's freezing outside then it's going to drop whether its 70 degrees or 65 and your furnace is going to come on anyways. I understand how it would work in the spring or fall when the outside air might be the same as your interior temp. But why does it work in the winter?
2. How does doing your laundry once a week save energy as opposed to trying to keep up with it. I mean if you do a load of laundry every couple of days after peak hours (Say put a load on at bedtime and toss it into the dryer before you go to work) isn't that easier on the grid than doing five or six loads on the weekend when everyone else is doing their laundry?
Re: Green Nesties, maybe you can answer some questions for me
1) keeping the temperature the same overnight does use more energy. Yes, the furnace has to work harder in the morning if you lower the heat at night, but it only has to do it once. I think it's like comparing city to highway driving. Yes, you go faster on the highway so you'd think you'd use more fuel, but all the stops and starts of city driving actually burn more gas. Turning the furnace on and off all the time uses more energy than just turning it on once in the morning to heat the place back up to 70. And yes, if it's very cold outside, your furnace might have to turn on during the night because the interior temperature might fall below 65. But if your house is well-insulated it shouldn't be a problem. It often gets to -25 here, and when we turn our thermostat down to 65 at night, it rarely gets that low inside. Most nights our furnace doesn't have to kick on at all- our house loses heat so slowly that if it's 70 before we go to bed, it's usually still 66 or so when we wake up in the morning. Sometimes it's cold enough outside that we lose heat faster, and the furnace will kick on at night, but only has to turn on after several hours of being off, so we saved it from having to turn on for up to 6 hours. It does work.
But, I think more than all that, it takes more energy to heat the house to 70 than it does to 65. That's five extra degrees the furnace has to maintain. Furnaces don't burn hotter when you raise the temperature on the thermostat- they just heat longer to reach desired temperature. It makes a difference.
2) I haven't heard that. The only way that makes sense that I can think of is that maybe many people who do laundry every day aren't doing full loads. By waiting until the end of the week, maybe you're more likely to do a full load?
ETA: or maybe it's like the furnace... maybe once you have your dryer turned on and heated up, it makes more sense to keep doing load after load instead of spacing it out over a week, when it has to go through all the effort of heating up again? Dryers are very very inefficient, and they're one of the highest sources of energy usage in a home (second after refrigerators, I read somewhere).
ahh but if you live in an older home that's not insulated well (we have our thermostat programmed to drop to 62 at 10 pm and if it's super cold outside say -15 or colder then it by 11:00 it's already at 65) then the theory doesn't work. Because then your furnace cycles on and off a bunch of times through the night anyways whenever it drops below 62 and then runs for a few hours in the morning trying to get the house to a comfortable temp.
Ditto #1. You will save so much money but having your heat automatically adjust for different times of the day.
#2 - never in my life have i heard this.
The hotter it is inside, the faster you will lose heat to the outside when it's cold outside. If the temperature difference between the inside and outside isn't as great, then you will not lose heat as fast. If you have it at 62 at night, then you won't be losing heat quite as fast as if it was still 70. This is true whether your home doesn't maintain heat as well as a newer home or not.
ETA: BC Hydro estimates that every 2 degree drop in your thermostat equates 5% savings.
#1-I did some reading before figuring out a schedule for my furnace, and with my thermostat it will start about an hour before the scheduled temp change time gradually warming by 1 degree at a time, so your furnace is not working overtime all at once.
#2-I've also read that you are suppose to save money by doing the bulk of your laundry all at once on a non-peak day b/c in theory your loads would be completely full, and if you use a dryer, it is already warmed up, so your second, third, etc load doesn't take as long to dry, thus using less energy.
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