Do you know what the goldilocks temperature for your house is? You could probably make a good guess - it's between 18 - 21°C. A lot of houses are warmer than they need to be wasting a lot of energy.
Most modern houses use a thermostat to turn the boiler off when the local air temperature reaches the set point. Thermostats are commonly placed in corridors to try to measure the temperature of the whole house however it doesn't work well. The room temperatures are frequently warmer than the corridors. If the living room 21°C and the corridors are 17°C, the thermostat keeps the boiler on when it doesn't need to, wasting energy.
Setting the thermostat 1°C lower than the temperature causes the boiler to switch off when the living room is warm, not the corridor. 1°C doesn’t sound like much but that small change can save £ 80 per person a year and 320 kg CO2 per house per year.
A common misconception about thermostats is that by turning thermostats up, the house will warm up faster. This heats the house excessively and wastes money because it will keep warming the house until it reaches the higher temperature. Instead, on cold days, it is better to turn up the radiators using their valves as this lets more heat into the room. You just need to remember to turn down the radiator when the cold snap is over.
