2022 Spring Home and Garden

Page 18 2022 Spring Home and Garden LINCOLN DAILY NEWS April / May 2022 2022 Spring Home and Garden LINCOLN DAILY NEWS April / May 2022 Page 19 simple way: move the lever to make it warmer or cooler in the room. A programmable thermostat is a precision electronic device that monitors what the temperature is and electronically makes adjustments. There are no moving parts inside. You don’t need your bifocals to read the tiny little marks on the thermostat to tell what the temp is currently set to. The programmable thermostat has a big readable screen that tells you what the status is, and intuitive controls make it function. There are now hundreds of brands and models of programmable thermostats on the market. Some of them are available for FREE or reduced cost from Ameren or your regional energy provider. In this primer we will endeavor to explore some of the features of programmable thermostats that make them attractive and better control your energy costs. There are three main functions of a quality programmable thermostat: scheduling, automating, and communications. With scheduling you can lower your heating and cooling costs by setting times when you need less heating or cooling. When you are at work, school, away from home or in bed, you don’t need as much heating or cooling. With scheduling, you can set times of the day and night when your thermostat is set to a lower temperature (for heating) or a higher temperature for cooling. By using scheduling, we can make our heating and cooling system coast during those times and often not use any energy at all. Good scheduling will wake your system up to make it a comfortable temperature prior to your arrival or the time you get up. Scheduling is the programmable thermostat’s best feature! Some programmable thermostats have the advanced feature of “learning” or automating your routine. The Nest Learning Thermostat learns your family’s routines and monitors what is going on in the house to make decisions on its own about what heating or cooling is required. It monitors the outside temperature to get the best efficiency from your furnace. It monitors your coming and going to make decisions about when to let the system coast, and learns your routines (such as when you go to bed) to set lower temperatures in your house. Finally, most programmable thermostats can be controlled remotely with an app on your cell phone, or will even communicate with your home automation system such as Google Home or Alexa. You can monitor and adjust the temperature in your house from half a world away with the communications feature CONTINUED u A fter about 10 years of stable heating and cooling costs here in Central Illinois, the first heating bill of this 2021/2022 winter season was a big shock. Most people’s heating costs went up between $100 to $300 a month, making the cost of energy one of our biggest expenditures. There are a few ways to tame the cost of heating. Install more home insulation. Weather-strip windows and doors. Turn the thermostat down and put on more clothes. But there is a practicality side here too; you can stand low household temperatures for so long and only put on so many extra clothes. After doing the insulation and weather- stripping, a better method of controlling the cost of heating is to get a programmable thermostat. Yesterday’s thermostat was a mechanical device that roughly detects the temperature of the room by the expansion and contraction of a coiled metal strip with a mercury switch attached. It is a crude device, by modern day standards, that works in a Cut heating and air conditioning expense with a programmable thermostat CONTINUED u