The thermostat is a small but essential appliance in your home. It’s easy to overlook, but think about the job it does: it controls the comfort levels in your house and the fans circulating the air. (If you have a humidistat as part of the thermostat, it also controls humidity levels.) Unfortunately, people often have misunderstandings about thermostats, and this can end up raising their comfort costs.
We don’t want you to have lesser comfort and higher utility bills because of thermostat myths. We’ll lay out some important truths about your household thermostat to help.
Summers in Louisiana bring both heat and humidity—and everyone knows this is an unpleasant combo! No matter how hot it is, a high level of humidity will make the heat feel worse. This is because the moisture in the air makes it harder for the human body to release heat through perspiration. With more heat trapped in the body, people feel even hotter than the air around them.
When the last cold days of winter and early spring are in your rear-view mirror you probably won’t need to turn your furnace back on until fall comes again. In fact, we recommend you do either a partial or full shutdown of your furnace system once the weather forecast shows nothing but warm days for a long stretch to come. This is an easy way to lower your energy bills. 
Spring is often a time of weird weather shifts, but the trend is toward warmer weather until the true summer heat settles in. You’ll use your home heating system less and less through April and May until it shuts off for a few months.
When the cold weather winds down as spring advances, you’ll want to put the winter far behind you and consider your summer plans. The air conditioner in your house will soon switch to regular operation, so this is the ideal time to schedule its annual maintenance appointment.
As the winter winds down and the official start of spring arrives (i.e. this week), you’ll probably not give much thought to your furnace. The weather is going to warm up gradually on the climb toward the summer heat.
The heat pump is a hard-working comfort appliance. It puts in more work than a standard air conditioner or a furnace because a heat pump runs in both winter and summer. When it’s cold, a heat pump draws heat from the outside to warm the house. When it’s hot, a heat pump draws heat from out of the house to cool it. It uses the same components no matter if it’s in heating or cooling mode, so these parts can wear down rapidly over the years—twice as fast as an AC or a furnace.
A furnace generates heat, either using gas burners or electrical heating elements, to warm up the air, then uses a blower to send the heated air into the ductwork of a home. As with any heat-generating appliance, there’s some potential for a fire hazard, although this is rare for modern furnaces. However, if you ever notice an acrid burning odor coming from the vents when your home’s furnace is running, it can be alarming.
