Skip Navigation
Asklemmy @lemmy.ml
root @lemmy.zip

What temperature do you keep your thermostat at?

Title. We keep ours at 75F, parents do 77F, and in laws 68F. It made me curious what everyone else keeps theirs at?

258 comments

  • WHAT THE HELL IS A FARENHEIT πŸ‡ͺπŸ‡ΊπŸ‡ͺπŸ‡ΊπŸ‡ͺπŸ‡ΊπŸ‡ͺπŸ‡ΊπŸ‡ͺπŸ‡ΊπŸ‡ͺπŸ‡ΊπŸ‡ͺπŸ‡Ί

  • I have been involved in many of these types of discussions, and I'm convinced that we are not experiencing the same temperatures when we set our thermostats to the same temperature. If I set mine any lower than 77Β°F, I would freeze to death. But many people here set theirs to below 70Β°F.

    I have a few hypotheses.

    1. Apparently AC units can really only make the temperature about 20-25Β°F degrees colder than the outside ambient temperature. It is over 100Β°F in my area almost every day from June to mid September, so any temperature below about 78Β°F just means your AC is on 100% of the time. This is removing moisture from the air, making it feel colder.
    2. My thermostat is right next to my garage door, which is not insulated. This is probably where the majority of heat enters the house. So the thermostat thinks it is warmer than it is. Other people might be in similar or opposite situations and need to set their thermostats to account for that.
    3. People's AC units are not actually cooling anywhere near those temperatures. The unit is just on 100% of the time at those temperatures, and they could realistically increase the temperature a great deal and get the same results.
    4. Humidity.
    5. Some people's AC units/thermometers just suck. 65Β°F on their unit actually gets the space to the same temperature as 75Β°F on my unit.

    • Number 2 has merit. Here are a few more.

      1. Most thermostats do require calibration, and nobody has time for that. This has a similar effect to your second point. Proper air flow (or lack thereof) throughout the home is also important.
      2. Sunlight makes a huge difference. A temperature that feels comfortable at night may not feel comfortable at noon in a home with a lot of natural light. Same as a sunny vs a cloudy day, indoors or outdoors.
      3. Men and women have drastically different tolerances for comfortable room temperature. In general, non-menopausal women tend to appreciate a slightly warmer room than men. This plays out in office spaces all over the world, with many women running space heaters under their desks.
      4. Clothing obviously makes a huge difference. Some people prefer to dress for their desired temperature; others prefer to dress for their physical comfort and let the HVAC balance things out accordingly.
      5. Medical conditions and medications and diet can all drastically affect one's body heat output. For example, anything that boosts serotonin is likely to make one run hot. Stimulants will constrict blood vessels and make one cold, especially in the extremities. And we all know what alcohol does (dilates blood vessels, allowing more heat to escape the body, lowering one's body temperature despite actually making them feel warmer). Blood sugar levels make a difference. The list is endless.

      But it's interesting that most of your thought process went into how HVAC systems and humidity work, versus the simple fact that the people themselves are just drastically different (see points 3 through 5).

    • This is removing moisture from the air, making it feel colder.

      That’s not how humidity works. Higher humidity means that cooler temperatures feel much colder and warmer temperatures feel much warmer. Even the heat index calculation shows this. Just try it out for yourself, or look at the formula. https://www.weather.gov/epz/wxcalc_heatindex

      People's AC units are not actually cooling anywhere near those temperatures. The unit is just on 100% of the time at those temperatures, and they could realistically increase the temperature a great deal and get the same results.

      I don’t know why you think this. Maybe you only have a single stage AC or maybe you’ve never actually measured the temp with an extra thermometer, but you can get the ac 40-50Β°F cooler than outside, both by removing humidity (which decreases the β€œfeels like” temp) but also through actually heat removal from the house. You might just have bad insulation as well.

      If you live in a dry climate you can do the opposite. Pump humidity in using a swamp cooler, which places moisture in the air and then immediately causes it to evaporate carrying heat with it in the state change. You’re cooling the air slightly and since moisture exaggerates temperature changes it feels cooler to you.

    • My thermostat is right next to my garage door, which is not insulated. This is probably where the majority of heat enters the house. So the thermostat thinks it is warmer than it is.

      I've got an Ecobee thermostat and they sell little temperature sensors that you can place anywhere in your house. You can configure which sensors are used at which time - for example I have a sensor in my bedroom, and configured it to only look at the bedroom temperature overnight. If you select multiple sensors, it averages them.

      It's a decent solution to this problem.

    • Yeah, those are all good points and certainly factor in. There are objective studies about human comfort preferences used for building design. I expect OPs question is a roundabout way to ultimately ask about comfort preferences.

  • 21C in the winter. 23C in the summer. Well at least these are the settings during the daytime. During sleeping hours they are set to 19C in the winter and 25C in the summer.

  • My heating is set at 21Β°C (70F) for daytimes and 16Β°C (61F) for the night time, so it doesn't come on at all during summer, and a lot of spring (UK). During winter when it gets colder out (like below about 6Β°C/43F) I will usually need to whack it up by a couple of degrees, or give it a little extra blast in the morning to warm up. Its an old building (late 1800s) and my flat has external walls on three sides, and a cold empty basement below, so it can get quite cold when the outside temperature drops.

    Edited to make it clear i mean my heating thermostat, because I realised most people here are talking about AC and that's very rare in homes here.

  • We typically keep our house at 68F in the summer, and in the winter it’s 63F during the day, 55F at night. We like it on the chilly side.

    • To help those unfamiliar with Fahrenheit (like I am)

      68Β°F = 20Β°C
      63Β°F = 16.6Β°C
      55Β°F = 12.8Β°C

  • Right now in summer: 67 overnight while we sleep (helps that we have tiered power pricing where late night power is almost half the price of it during the day), 72 when we're up, and 80 between 2 and 6pm when we have the most expensive power hours. Luckily we're in an apartment that's like three years old, so it's surprisingly well insulated and hasn't gotten above 73 during those hot hours.

  • 70F (21C) during the summer time, and usually its off during the winter (we just have the windows open, and might briefly use a space heater if its really really cold).

    In fall and spring it just heavily depends on the day and how it feels.

  • I do 76F in the summer for AC and 68F in the winter for heating. Try to use minimal heating and air and still maintain a comfortable range. Can get expensive if working the system too hard. If it wasn't a matter of cost I'd leave it on 72F all the time.

    Evaporative coolers are great if you live where you can use one, much cheaper to run and they can work pretty good as long as humidity isn't too high. I had one in a house I lived in before along with a regular AC system. It was a good to have and saved a lot on the electric bill. If it was dry enough out the AC unit was not needed.

    Haven't used a heat pump before and don't know much about them. If they work as well and cost less to operate that would be a good option, but I wouldn't use one if it's a downgrade in performance. Rather pay for the comfort.

  • In the winter, 68, 69 if I'm particularly cold, In the summer I don't turn on the AC unless I'm absolutely dying, and then it only goes to 77. I'm a lizard, I love the heat, but I also hate paying high gas bills.

  • The simplified version

    Summer: Day: 76Β°F (24Β°C), Night: 73Β°F (22Β°C)

    Winter: Day: 78Β°F (25Β°C), Night: 73Β°F (22Β°C)

  • 70F set it and forget about it until i woke up freezing at the middle of a night.

  • We're in Canada so we use Celsius but I'll convert for our farenheit friends:

    23C/73.4F most of the time we try to keep the heat/AC off in spring/fall when it makes sense to do so.... We seem to generate a lot of heat inside (we have a lot of computers in the house) so it has to be quite a bit cooler outside to justify opening windows. something like 16C/60F, then between the heat from everything inside and the cold outside, we tend to keep rather comfortable.

    My last place was an apartment and we didn't have control over the heating. Whenever it was on, we were cooking, so we left all the windows open all winter (the super knew about the situation and recommended we do this). The valves for the baseboard heaters were extremely old, didn't have knobs, and the super said he could try to adjust them, but there's a decent chance that they could snap and flood the apartment. Nobody wanted that, so we just left the windows open. For summer, I only turned on our AC at the apartment after the haters shut off. I wasn't going to pay to run AC to cool the place down while they were actively heating it up.... I'm glad we don't live there anymore because of that, though, everything else about the place was stellar. The landlord tried to get the owner to Green light the replacement of the valves while the system was not in use (namely in summer when they turned it off) since it would be easy to drain the system and do the work, but they didn't, so year after year, Windows open in winter. It kinda sucked, but we did what we had to. I installed a netatmo temperature system and at times in the dead of winter with all the windows open, the inside temps would read in excess of 30C/86F which wasn't fun. Hanging around in boxers with all the windows open in the dead of winter, and still sweating by doing nothing at all, wasn't great.

    My new place has it's problems with airflow, but it's much better overall.

258 comments