Stay Comfortable, Save Cash with an Aube Programmable Thermostat

The average American household spends more than $2,000 annually on energy bills, and nearly half that goes toward heating and cooling.  That's close to $1,000 a year.  Conventional wisdom has it that if you want to save on those bills, you just turn down the heat and wear more clothes.  Long underwear.  A sweater.  In the summer, of course, you're supposed to just shed your clothes and avoid all movement.  But as we know, conventional wisdom is often just out-of-date wisdom, and such is most definitely the case when it comes to your heating and cooling bills.

Programmable thermostats can save you up to $180 annually, (that's 18%), without requiring you to do so much as button up a cardigan.  The Aube 30V Programmable Thermostat, for example, has up to four temperature settings per day.  You can set it to turn down when you're away at work, and to heat the place back up toward the end of the day so you don't come home to a cold house.  You might have it turn the heat down after you go to bed and back up, say, half an hour before you get up, so you don't have to cook your bacon in the cold.  No inconvenience, no discomfort.  Set the thing once and it's all automatic.  It even switches automatically between heating and cooling settings, and backs itself up so it will retain its settings  through a power outage.  The Aube also works on a seven day schedule, so if you spend your weekends up at your ski condo, or down at your beach house, your thermostat can accommodate.  The seven day schedule also opens up some good possibilities for family fun: just imagine "Warm Wednesdays," or "Frigid Fridays."  The limits... there are no limits.

But really, $180 in annual savings averages out to $15 a month.  That means, at 55 bucks, the Aube thermostat pays for itself in under four months, and after that you'll be saving $15 a month forever, without even noticing a difference in temperature.  Pretty good.

Hemingway wrote of his time in Paris: "It had never seemed strange to me to wear sweatshirts for underwear to keep warm.  It only seemed odd to the rich."  Ah, but Ernest.  If only you had had a programmable thermostat, wearing sweatshirts under your clothes would have seemed pretty strange to you, too.