Quote:
Originally Posted by RobertSmalls
The bedroom is perhaps 150ft², out of the 500ft² of conditioned plus 300ft² semi-conditioned space in my house. I've been thinking about electric, but I would need it to be a thermostatically controlled electric space heater. Also, I do need the furnace to keep the house warm five hours a day, and to keep the house from dropping below freezing while I'm not home. Not that it would drop 30°F in 19 hours, but I do want automated safeguards like a thermostat and a furnace in place.
The furnace is grossly oversized, as is the house, actually. It comes on for less than 15 minutes at a time, probably every few hours this time of year.
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I'd definitely want to look at the electric option for the bedroom then. The furnace is probably working extra hard pumping heat only into the bedroom.
I had a couple of weeks where my wife and son were out of town, so I experimented with something similar. I had a small space heater in the bedroom, and turned the furnace down to 40 degrees at night and while I was away, upping it to 65 when I was up and around. The electric heater wasn't thermostatically controlled, but I found that leaving it on a very low setting, coupled with an extra blanket, made things quite comfortable.
I also turned down the water heater to a temperature where I could take 'navy showers' with just the hot water faucet, and moderated the use of the lights to just the room I was occupying.
Both the gas and electric bills for that month were down almost 50%.