this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2023
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Cautionary tale:
For us it was trial and error. We thought we were doing pretty well by keeping track of the weather and balancing the whole house heating vs single room. Until we had a snap freeze that plummeted the temps overnight to an obscene degree. We were comfortably warm in our bedroom as all the pipes in the kitchen and bathroom were bursting.
10's of thousands of dollars in demolition and reconstruction later we have decided that in this instance it's better to waste some small amount of energy keeping the whole house heated rather than risking another catastrophic failure.
Your mileage may vary.
Fwiw, most modern thermostats have an emergency failsafe temp setting that will always turn the heater on when reached, even if inadvertently set lower by mistake. Saved my bacon in a rental once.
As a side note, if you for some reason turn off the central heating entirely and just use space heaters, then the failsafe will do no good.
Most central heating solutions waste some energy when idling, so one might be tempted to turn them off. Please be careful when doing this.
This was a solid case of "if it ain't broke don't fix it" the thermostat and heating system in question was from the 60's or 70's and had served us with no issues for as long as we had been there. Hindsight 20/20 and all that jazz.
Fwiw there is low power heat tape you can buy to run along pipes to keep then from freezing. Had this on a pipe that ran through an attic and would freeze when the outside temp got extreme, despite heating the house.