Don't Crank Up Thermostat for Heat

3 min read

OK. We've all done it. Walk into a cold home and immediately turn the thermostat all the way up. The thought is that cranking your stat all the way up will give you more heat, or at least heat up your room or home faster. Unfortunately, in most cases, this is more of a myth than reality. When you're dealing with our heaters, there's just one amount of heat output. Your thermostat gets your room to different temperatures by changing the amount of time that the heater is running. So if a 1,500-watt Com-Pak heater is on, it's putting out 1,500 watts of heat. If a 4-foot baseboard heater is on, it's putting out 1,000 watts of heat. The heaters can't put out more or less heat to get the room to temperature. So what does cranking the thermostat really do? Nothing to get your room warmer faster. It just means your heater will stay on longer to get your room to the higher set temperature. If you're looking to walk into a comfortable room when you get home, you have two options:

  1. Setting a programmable thermostat to your schedule.
  2. Turning your thermostats down a few degrees when you're away instead of turning them off completely.

*Unlike all of our other products and most electric heaters, our Energy Plus can vary the amount of heat they output to fit the need of the room. The digital controls dynamically sense the amount of heat needed to keep a room at the set temperature and adjusts itself accordingly. And yes, if you have a two-stage or multi-stage furnace, cranking the thermostat up might actually give you a little more heat. But that's more of an exception than the rule.