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Fun_Top5285 t1_j6mmyv5 wrote

My kid had one of those fancy thermostats (Nest) that saves energy by shutting down the heat when it doesn't sense movement, figuring you have left the house. Real stupid idea. During a cold spat a few years ago they went out and came back to a frozen pipe in a wall, It cost them dearly.

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northursalia t1_j6mvj06 wrote

Nest thermostats don't shut off the heat if people aren't sensed, it turns it back to the configured 'away' temperature. Getting past that, the default safety temp (temp to call for heat even if the thermostat was manually set to 'off') is 40 degrees. They would have had to intentionally disable the safety temp setting for this to have occurred. That is a fault of the user, not of the thermostat.

We've been using them for years - they save about a tank of oil each year, and we've gone on week-long vacations in the dead of winter with no issues of frozen pipes.

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Fun_Top5285 t1_j6mzubi wrote

Their away temp during the day must have been too low, I guess. Maybe they missed that in the directions. Live and learn. It happened about 8 years ago.

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eljefino t1_j6pe0jc wrote

Coasting from 65 to 40 in the middle of the room is a long time and enough time for cold to infiltrate the walls and get to the baseboard pipes.

Don't do the setback, don't try to save energy this weekend. A service call for burst pipes, if you can even get a guy out there, is way more expensive than an extra 10 gallons of fuel oil.

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