How cold do you keep your house in the winter?

[obstinate]

65 day, 50 night. I know I could do more but wifey has needs. We also spot heat rooms we're in (bedroom in the morning just after waking up, two-year-old's room all night.

Next year we are moving into a small apartment in Manhattan and I may allow the temperature to rise a bit, since the square footage we'll be heating will but cut by 65%.

[icemodeled]

When we lived in Ohio we always set the thermostat at 68, it still felt so cold (not the best windows or installation) but the bill was very reasonable. We noticed that if we changed it at all during the month even for a short time in the day - lower or higher it seemed the bill would be more.. so we set it and left it alone. I'm naturally always cold, so I would be bundled up at this temp but bills stayed cheap. Now in Florida, we never use the heat!

[katscratch]

It's below freezing outside and mine's set at 72F right now.  I kept it quite a bit lower until this week but kept coming home to the dog and cat cuddled up against each other in shared misery.  The living room is 72, and the upstairs a bit warmer, but the kitchen and main floor bedrooms are quite a bit colder, getting no direct light in the winter.  I sleep upstairs ;)

One year I set the thermostat at 80F.  It didn't make as big a difference to my gas bill as I thought it would.  I still try to minimize wastefulness, but I don't worry as much about keeping the house comfortable.

[BlueMR2]

Of course, all this only applies above 0F.  When we go sub-zero I turn it up to 70F-74F (when we hit -15F) as the margin for pipes freezing starts to become uncomfortably close.

Can you elaborate on that?  I've never given that much thought.

Our kitchen plumbing runs partially *through* an exterior wall.  Even with all the insulation, when it's -15F and the wind is blowing from that side, even the inside of that wall can get closer to freezing than I'd like.  A few extra degrees in the house helps.

[overwhelmed]

My thermostats seem to have a lot of time/day settings which I haven't figured out how to streamline, so I scrolled through them all.

1st floor is 68 during the day ends up at 62
2nd floor ranges from 62-65

[Lulee]

I have to pay to heat my apartment and it's not in a well-insulated building so the baseboard heaters struggle to keep things comfortable.  I keep it at 64F at night and whenever I'm out and am trying to keep it at 66F when I'm home.  The thermostat's in the living room and the warmest room of the place so other rooms are 2-4 degrees cooler excepting in near to sub-zero weather when the whole blooming place seems to have walls of ice --- I keep it warmer those days to protect all the pipes as well as my sanity.