Hi. I’m throwing this out to the PulseLine or someone who knows something about heating. Do we really save any money by turning our thermostat from 68 down to 64 during the day when we aren’t there? It seems to me the furnace has to fire just as many times to keep the house at 64 as it does to keep the house at 68. So if anybody actually knows something… I’ve heard so many things back and forth whether it pays to do this… please put it in the PulseLine. Thank you. Actually, turning your thermostat down a few degrees during the day while you’re away from home, and at night while you sleep, will save on energy costs as it will reduce the number of times your heating system needs to cycle on to maintain that internal temperature. As soon as the temperature in your home drops below the setting on the thermostat, it begins to lose energy to the surrounding environment. The lower the interior temperature, the slower that heat loss. It’s true that turning up your thermostat when you come home will prompt your system to run for a longer period of time to get your home to the higher temperature, but you’ll still save more energy and money over the time your system worked less intensely while you were gone. Installing an automatic setback or programmable thermostat gives you more control while maintaining a comfortable home. You can set the thermostat to begin the cool down well before you leave the house or go to bed and return to its regular temperature a few hours before you wake up or return home.
Yeah, read with interest the legal notices in the Westfield News, Wednesday, December 3rd – The Westfield Gas and LIght has now unbelievably decided to charge an $18.00 per month fee if you opt out of the automated remote metering for electricity. Maybe the PulseLine can do a story on that one. Very interesting. The rate adjustment you saw advertised will apply to only 25 customers of the over 18,000 customers of the WG+E who are the ones who elected to “opt out” of participating in the automated meter reading initiative that the department launched close to two years ago. The legal notice is a requirement of the Massachusetts General Law, Chapter 164, Section 58 which mandates that a utility must advertise any changes in rates or tariffs in a newspaper published in the municipality. While the WG+E was not under any regulatory option to offer this “opt out” process, it did so to accommodate customer choice. The additional fee will be assessed only to those who opted out so as not to pass those added costs of manually reading those meters on to those customers who chose to have new efficient metering equipment installed.
Decades ago, when Lady Bird Johnson took on “litter” as her first Lady project, I judged it as lame; after all, there was a war going on. And now, as I am about the age she was then, I’m appalled by the amount of litter (and after all, there’s a war on).
