Thermostats

Readers letters

People use thermostats as manual on-off switches

I wonder if the opening paragraph of Ben Sampson's feature "Pump up the Heat" (Professional Engineering, 22 September 2010) illustrates Ben's own poor use of thermostats, or his accurate perception of their frequent misuse by others.

He says "As nights draw in and thermostats are turned up...", but why? If the thermostat is set to the correct temperature, why does it need to be changed at this, or any other, time of year?

Many people use thermostats as manual on-off switches, turning them to minimum when they feel warm and to maximum when they feel cold.

The three salient points are:-

a) If they understood what a thermostat is for they would leave it alone and let it do its job, kicking in the heating (or indeed cooling) if the temperature passes the preset threshold

b) If they hadn't changed the thermostat setting in the first place then they shouldn't be too cold (or too hot) and so shouldn't feel the need to adjust it to the opposite end of it's range

c) Turning a room thermostat to the limit of its range does not cause the room to heat up faster

There is nothing worse than entering a meeting room on a Monday morning when the person who was in there on the Friday afternoon has set the thermostat to either extreme and blissfully gone home, leaving a closed room that becomes an ice-box or a furnace!