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I feel like people freaking out over touching thermostats is like turning on a dome light in the backseat of a car at night. In my 30’s and also am a newer homeowner and don’t give a shit if people touch the thermostat. Wonder what caused it to be to be such a hot button topic?
Finances. It costs money to run the heater, and working class families are on really regimented budgets. A difference of $30-$50 in your power bill can really mess things up when you’re living on a strict budget.
Yeah, energy prices have skyrocketed these past few years where I live. Last winter we had as high as (equivalent) 1€/kWh. It really is anxiety inducing when you pull down the indoor temps to sub 15 celsius, almost halve your usage and still end up with the power bill tripling
At a certain point in this cartoon, I think it stops being entirely about the thermostat, and becomes more about Calvin doing what his mum told him to do.
Monitoring my electric and gas bills now as an adult and I get it. It’s not too bad going from 65 to 68, but 65 to 90 would use up a lot of electricity in my case (and prior to my HVAC upgrade, uses gas which is cheaper but dries me out more). I’ll still let guests do it to some degree, but we’re talking a few dollars a day in the extreme. A month of my kid not touching my thermostat is equal to my kid getting a modestly priced video game.
Granted, I’m also the type to walk or bike a few miles instead of drive to avoid a few dollars in gas and maintenance costs. I’m not ecologically friendly, I’m just stingy.
Dude holy crap is that why I’m so dry this winter? First winter in this house that’s gas heated… apartment was electric.
No it’s not, there must be something else going on in your house and the person you responded to. Gas doesn’t dry the house any more than electric heating.
Winters are dry because the dew point is generally pretty low in the winter. Relative humidity is a function of air temp and dew point; the greater the difference, the higher the RH.
If you take cold air with a low dew point and heat it to a comfortable temperature you will always get a low RH as a result and the air doesn’t care how that happens.
A little more eli5:
Hot air stores more water inside itself, and cold air stores less.
As such, cold air that is completely full of water and can’t store any more is at 100% relative humidity, aka 100% saturation.
When that air warms up, it’s able to store more, and as such the relative humidity goes down, similar to getting a bigger bucket that has the same amount of water. It’s now less full.
Thing is, your body doesn’t care about how much water is actually in the air, it only cares about whether it can take/give water to the air. Hence relative humidity is the only thing that matters.
Yeah I don’t think gas would be dryer, except it’s cheaper so we ran it more often. Now I wear sweaters instead, it’s less dry.
See I had never really thought the method of heating would matter, so that makes sense.
Now as to why this house feels so much more dry compared to the apartment, idk. Maybe the smaller apartment was more humidified from showers / dish washer / cooking than the larger house is.
Yeah that makes sense
Maybe with gas you heat to a higher temperature thus making air dryer
Do you have kids cranking it up to 90?
Or people who don’t understand how a thermostat works and crank it up thinking that’ll mean it gets to the actual desired temperature faster and then overshoot to then turn it way down and repeat…
Oh, you’ve met my wife
hot button topic
finger guns
It really is. I get it if you’re on extremely limited finances, but for most American families the $15 difference between a comfortable temperature and a uncomfortable one is hardly worth caring about compared to actually feeling comfortable in your own home.
In my case it’s a difference of nearly $100/month to run the heat for a couple hours in the morning and it’s only set at 70. I’d love these tiny amounts people are paying. I don’t even live in a big place.
Unless you live in a subarctic climate you likely have a poorly insulated house, inefficient heat, or both. My previous house was a 2400 sqft modern home on a heat pump and I was paying ~$80 a month for 24/7 heat at 72 degrees.
That said:
Depending on the circumstances, running the heater “for a few hours in the morning” can be more expensive than keeping the heat on all the time. Let’s say it’s 20 degrees outside at night. A well insulated home can take almost the entire day to cool down from 70 to 20, and then you need to run the heater at full duty cycle for a long time to get it back up to temp for your morning routine.
The energy difference between keeping a house at 70 all day versus heating it from 20 to 70 every morning might be a lot smaller than you expect, so even with gas heating it might not me as much extra as you expect to keep the heat on all the time. Furthermore, if you have a heat pump heater it will kick on low efficiency auxiliary heaters if there is a large difference between the desired temp and the current indoor temp. Under those circumstances it will be WAY more expensive to run the heater for a few hours each day than to keep it on.
Also, usually when we talk about parent fighting with their kids about the thermostat, it’s usually a fight over whether to set it at 65 vs 70, not whether or not you have heat at all. Setting it 5f lower is going to be a much smaller difference than simply not using it.
Heat pumps, while not unheard of, are not common in the US. Most people especially those in older homes are using gas or electric furnaces which results in higher bills.
Hence my comment about inefficient heat. The real killer in terms of cost is electric resistance heaters. Luckily, those only make up 20-25% of homes in the USA.
That’s kind of besides the original point though. Most people only run heaters regularly in cold climates and heater cost is proportional to the temperature difference. If it’s an average of 20f outside it will only cost ~10% more to heat the home to 70 instead of 65 and that can be a pretty big difference in comfort for the occupants for a relatively small proportion of extra cost.
No, it’s due to where I live. Default power bill with no heat is about $150. This is just to exist, anything extra like heat kicks it up like crazy. The utility company and regulatory body are openly corrupt and approve a never-ending series of rate hikes.
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My older relatives still routinely cite the 70s oil/energy crisis whenever someone adjusts the thermostat. I think that kind of cross-societal scarcity of resources leaves an impact on someone for the rest of their lives.
(I’m assuming most home heating in the 70s then would have been gas or oil based)
