Thermostat Roulette

One thing that kinda frustrates me about living in Florida around this time of year are the wars that one goes through with the thermostat.

I don’t know what it is, but this has been a problem in all three of the places I’ve lived since I moved here six years ago. It happens about twice a year – both right around now and then again somewhere between “winter” and spring when the weather gets all topsy-turvy. One minute it’s warm, the next minute it’s cold again, and what’s left lost in the confusion? The thermostat.

You see, every single thermostat that I’ve seen down here in Florida has two distinct settings – one for the AC, and a second for the heater. Flipping between the two is completely manual, done with the flick of a switch, and thus several times each season I wake up to find myself either roasting or freezing, depending on Mother Nature’s mood swing of the moment and which setting the thermostat had been left on before going to bed the previous night.

I guess what I don’t understand is why we can’t have auto-sensing thermostats that can just adjust between the two when it becomes clear that the temperature has gotten either too cold for the AC or too warm for the heater. And I understand that the thresholds would need to have a bit of a buffer, otherwise the two would just keep fighting back and forth by a single degree, but let me set an AC threshold to kick on when it gets warmer than 73 degrees and a heater threshold to take over if it drops beneath 70 or something. It’s still close enough to the separate settings for each that I currently use today, but allowing both to exist simultaneously would ensure that I’d wake up to a house consistently between 70 and 73 degrees, as opposed to in the mid 60s or high 70s that the current single-setting system occasionally permits. Seems simple enough to me, anyways…

Tell me, does this kind of intelligent thermostat already exist out there somewhere and maybe I just haven’t seen it because my landlords didn’t spring for the extra cash? There’s not much that I can do about it while still in a rental, but I
can’t say that I wouldn’t strongly consider it when it comes time to buy a house of my own.

1 Comment

  1. “extra cash”??? My place of employment has one of those magical thermostats. It’s not so much a matter of springing the extra cash, believe me. It tells you the current temperature, and you can set it to kick the heat on at a certain low and the ac at a certain high. They DO exist!

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *