Austin Energy Costs.

How much can you save by changing your thermostat settings?

A while ago me and my family moved to Austin. With the new city came new and exciting things to see and do, new friends, but also less exciting things like new budgets. Having moved from the Netherlands (a cold country with high energy costs) I was cautious about using our AC. Initially I thought cooling your house was for the weak. That is until I experienced my first Texan summer...

After many household discussions about the thermostat settings, I finally decided to calculate "how much exactly" does it cost to heat and cool our home. I used Python for the analysis and read the data into a PostgreSQL database (just to keep things interesting). Weather data was downloaded from Kaggle and the government publishes aggregated household energy consumption data . And the result?

Outcome

You will save $8 per year by setting your thermostat to heat to 65 instead of 66 degrees. You will save $22 per year by setting your thermostat to cool to 77 instead of 76 degrees. That was also the end of the discussion - we'll just go out for dinner one time less and control our house to a comfortable temperature!

For those interested in the calculations:
See Code