Being retired we turn up in the morning and it stays there even if we leave for a few hours. Then at night it gets turned down 2 deg. Having a heat pump it we set it in the way in the summer. The house stays from 70 to 74 deg all year and we dress to match.
When we lived in cold climate, during the day 70 was comfy. Sleep was
Now in a warm climate, 77 daytime summer is good, 74 for sleeping. When we had a cold spell I switched to heat mode and 72 daytime was on the chilly side, 70 at sleep.
I have a new Honeywell T-stat that gives me a report of runtime for heat and cool. It will be interesting (to me, anyway) to see how next year compares.
I worked at a company that had hundreds of temperture measuring points. The temperature was the hardest to calibrate accurately. We did have a standard that was calibrated to the NIST. As the temperature points were for a process we just calibrated them and ran the continious process and when the lab said the process was ok that is where we ran the automatic thermostats. Most of the instruments used thermocouples and the company we bought them from held them to only 2 deg C at 300 deg C as most of our measurments were from 250 to 310 deg C.
Just to show how far off they could be I took an engineer to a point that had 2 RTDs and 2 thermocouples in the same rod that was less that
1/2 of an inch in diameter and a foot long. Put it in the process and hooked it to a device that could read them. From the highest to the lowest was about 4 deg difference at 300 deg C. He wanted to know which one was correct and I told him to pick one as they were all within the limiates of our test equipment.
The temperature at the airport is hardly the temp in my homne.
My local electric company has them for $5 (instead of 120) but I would still have to calibrate/verify it. Being digital doesn't make it accurate.
That's the theory. In practice, it is not that easy.
To me it is.
I also worked at a company that calibrated sensors.
Well, I have "calibrated" countless steel rulers. Adjustment was not possible, but calibration, by definition, certainly was.
Cindy, I latched on to your question and ignored the question behind your question , which i think is why do you care what the temperature is. There are several reasons . One is that I always thought the house was at 68 during the day , and now that I have this new thermometer it says 73 all the time. Maybe I set the thermostat at 68 and I got 73 instead. .I doubt it but I would like to know.
Reason 2 is that a few nights ago it was 14° out , and i got out of heater because 'cause I wasn't sure the furnace would take care of things.I started the heater with the lowest setting and gradually turned it up a tiny bit until everything was working all but it climbed to 83 . And strangely I was not hot even at 83 nor was I called at 73 . I'd like to know if those were real numbers or if perhaps it was 68 and 78 . Reasons like that , so it's not just a matter of policy that i have at least two reasons why i wanna know what this thermometer says is accurate .
After a couple nights with the heater on all night and even during the day I turned it off and was surprised that the house stayed at least this room stayed at 73 all the time . I wanna know what the temperature really is .
By the way, the heater is interesting in itself. I've had it for 45 or
50 years and it was 20 years old at least when I found it somewhere. When I last used it in New York where the landlord Once in a while didn't provide enough heat, it was plugged in to a single receptacle, not a double like everybody else has and the rest of tha apartment had, in the maid's room, where i lived in my 6 room apartment , and one night or early one morning I was lucky enough to wake up and see the plug was on fire. Because the receptacle was 45 years old and it was loose. Now my current house is 45 years old but I don't think any of the receptacles are loose yet, which means they make better receptacles than they used to. My apartment then was in what had been a luxury building and I'm sure they didn't economize on the receptacles yet it was loose enough, hot enough to start a fire and the flames were an inch or two high from this black rubber plug that was on this old heater . I pulled out the cord and the flames went away . Then i replaced the plug with a new nice one with its own springiness, that they don't sell anymore because it's wide in one direction but too narrow in the other. But everything else is original at least 60 years old . I love old stuff---I also have the heater my mother bought when I was an infant 77 years ago so that she could warm the bathroom before I got a bath. That was in perfect condition until about 20 years ago , even the cloth cord. It was underneath the the bathroom sink and so was a A cardboard cylinder of toilet bowl cleaner , and even though nothing got wet the fumes of the cleaner must have filled the space there and it corroded all the Chrome parts on this heater . It still works i'm sure but it's no longer beautiful like it was for the 1st 50 years . It's also bulkier and heavier than the newew cheaper one but it's nice because it has a foot switch so you can turn it on and off while standing up . I think it has no thermostat . So you can't leave it alone . I had two other heaters an old small one very simple , and one from the 1980s that was big and wide and tall and Too bulky for what it did. . I must have given them away or they would be under the sink with these two
LOL VEry good. I'm not immune to mistaken feelings, but there is no one here but me to adjust my thermometer. I might even be able to fool myself, but it's harder.
I have the same and get reports too. Last one said it was colder for the period this year than last. I do not change setting but there is an app that I could put on the cell phone to change temperature if I wanted to.
Calibrating thermometers is a thing of the past for me. The thermostat, two indoor outdoor weather stations and an alcohol thermometer all agree.
I have the app on my phone and can see a daily graph and weekly total. Week of 12/16 I have 5 hours heating 3 hours cooling. Last week 24 minutes cooling 1 hr 35 minutes heating.
In August, it would be about 70 hours cooling.
Perhaps your ancient thermostat is defective. I imagine you'd be cold if your house actually was 68, depending on your activity level.
How not????
We generally keep the house around 18C - that's 64.4F most of the day and crank it up to about 21C (a BCH less than 70F) when we are sitting around in the evening then down to 17C (just under 63F) for sleeping.
In the summer we set to about 24c (75f +/-) if it gets uncomfortably hot and muggy - more to dehumidify than cool (up here in the "interlaken" area between Lake Ontario and Lake Erie, and south of Lake Huron where it can get VERY muggy in July and August) although when it hits 33C and above (90F+) the cooling is also DEFINITELY welcome!!!!!!
Glad you liked the 'Story'!! Actually that was only Part 1 of the 'Story'!! Part 2 is much shorter, and it goes like this. When the weather changed and the Heat went ON, before he tried to tell me that the Temperature was Off I went back in his office and adjusted the Glass Tube back to the original setting. He never complained...................... ;-)
BTW I am guessing with the huge pile of comments, suggestion, etc. you have more knowledge about the temperature thing!! Personally I have similar twist but I have figured out that the biggest challenge with the temperature is the Humidity level. During the winter I have a Humidifier that runs 24/7 and at the unit itself it is set to 60%. It cycles off at 61% and On at 57%. This means the rest of the house is maybe 45-50% Relative Humidity. It does quite well until the outside Humidity drops below 30% and then it runs at about 50-55% maybe. The other challenge is that I need to replace the filter due to the hard water every month. No big deal, just needs to be on the maintenance schedule.
The thoughts on Relative Humidity levels will make your comfort level better. Maybe, you have already went down that path.................
As for finding a "accurate" temperature device!! Get a woman to live in the house and adjust to her comfort level.
Later,
Les
Well, there can not be anything disolved in the water. It has to be distilled water. And it has to be sea level, and the appropriate latitude, so that the air pressure is exactly nominal. Then the conditions of the experiment have to be perfect.
We tried once.
That's great!
I don't know how I didn't think of this the first time, but i have a story related to your story.
We had a good landlord when I moved into the apartment in Brooklyn about
1974, but her husband nad died, she got old, reitired to Florida, and sold the building to someone who turned out to be or wanted to be a slumlord . He had other properties which he really did make into slums but ours was pretty good and instead he didn't provide enough heat sometimes. At night and he eveb turned the heat down illegally during the daytime even though they were old ladies people living in the building who didn't go out during the daytime . And I got cold too .I went to the basement , unscrewed the half on the furnace room door,hasp because it wasn't put on correctly so that it covered the screws, because the door wasn't perfect and that would have been difficult. The first time I looked around the furnace room and noted that he had short circuited the the box that turned off the furnace when there was smoke . That did not make me happy but an architect in the building said that with our cement floor 4 inches of cement between the basement and 1st floor it was not a big fire danger . Oh there was also a plastic dish pan of oil where the oil to the burner dripped and rather than fix the leak he had a dish fan there. And by the way his profession was a plumber , U don't think he was a good plumber . Then I saw the heat output control box and I looked at that
And I didn't do anything the first time or the second time I was there, When I left the room, I screwed the hasp back on and put spit on the screws so that they would rust by morning.
But the third time I was still cold and sometimes he still did things he wasn't supposed to do even after landlord tenant court told him not to. I was told that a baby had died because he was sick and there wasn't enough heat. The heat output control box didn't have temperature markings only letters ABCDEFG , i think , and I turned it up from C to D or D to E , and then I loosened the set screw on the knob and pointed the knob at the original value and tightened the set screw . And by golly we had more heat. I moved a few years later to Baltimore and I never told anybody what I did . The architect had moved and I didn't know anyone I could really entrust this information, This strikes me a lot like your adjusting the thermometer :-)
What do you not understand about "pure water" Distilled water is available virually everywhere. ALso what do you not understand about "corrected" One degree lower boiling point per 500 ft above sea level gets you VERY CLOSE.
For every 3.6Kpa pressure change the boiling point changes 1 degree C. - or for the 'mericans out there, for every inch of mercury change, the boiling point changes 1.7 degrees F.
You correct to "standard atmosphere" - either by altitude or atmospheric pressure - NOT BOTH because it is the change in atmospheric pressure at altitude (air density) that effects the boiling point - and we are NOT trying to calibrate to 1/10 degree - either C or F.
Using the Zero C or 32F freezing point to calibrate is totally unaffected by altitude or atmospheric pressure - just use PURE (distilled or de-ionized or RO) water.
NO rocket science involved.
Very rare for my (UK) home to be above 18C/64F in the winter - and I don't think I'm untypical. When I'm out or overnight, I'll let it go down to about
14C/57F. I find it perfectly comfortable.Don't really have that problem here :-)
LOL I was living in an apartment back in the 70's as well. I was on the 3rd floor. The landlord's parents lived on the 1st floor. During the winter the thermostat on the 3rd floor controlled the whole building!! It had a plastic lock box on it so I could not make any adjustments!!! Don't remember what it was set for but one day it got very cold outside strong wind blowing and unbearable inside on the
3rd floor. So, I took a plastic baggie and filled it with some ice cubes and placed it on top of the lock box. The heat came on and the day was great!! The landlord showed up later saying that something was wrong with the thermostat since it got VERY HOT on the 1st floor!! I said, maybe the thermostat got stuck ON some how??? He then had heating guy come in and inspect. Didn't find any thing wrong!!! :-)Have something to add? Share your thoughts — no account required.
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