temperature of house for winterized.

I have been running my home in SE idaho at 45 F for 8 years with no problem.

I do have a monitoring system that will call my cell phone at any predetermined temperature. I have my alarm temp set to 40 F. My system will also alarm on motion sensors and door monitors. Also alarms on power loss.

My system also allows me to call the system and it gives me the current temperature and status of the system. I do this every day then I know the system is working.

This is a repeat but open all cabinet doors on anything that has water on an outside wall.

I set our furnace at 48 degrees. Been doing that for 10 years. Here is how I verify of the furnace running. Our electric company, PP&L, has smart electric meters installed outside the house. I can logon to my electric company account and see a graph showing hour by hour usage. I can actually see a jump in the line graph when the furnace blower comes on. The furnace is natural gas, but of course the fan blower is electric. So this way I can actually see the furnace cycling. On colder days there are more jumps in the line graph showing the furnace running more often. During a typical 24 hour period the furnace runs about 6 or 7 times.

Thanks to everyone that was willing to share their opinions. I talked the the HVAC guy that is familiar with my house (including the hardwood flooring) and my heating systems. His recordation is to set the thermostat at 55f. Possible high humity levels and mold was one of his concerns.

As is pointed out above, a lot depends on the house construction and your comfort level. I set our Tstat at 10C (that's around 50F). The furnace is in the basement so the basement temp is about 1C warmer than the main floor (because of the furnace and ducts are located there). The Tstat is web enabled and I can remotely check the temps in the house (basement and main floor)each minute via the web, and our house checker and I get an E-mail warning if the temp goes below 8C. We've had some cold nights (around 0F) and the furnace runs only for 5 minutes every half hour to keep the temp above 10C at these outside temps.

I moved the temp up from 8C last winter to 10C this year because of the the ice storm we had last winter, power was down for over 24 hours. Good news is that the basement didn't go down to freezing during that period. I don't drain the water lines, just shut off the water, which fortunately is located at the basement floor level, chance of a freeze there is minimal since it's over 8 ft. below ground level.

I used to have an oil-fired dragon heating my house belching lots of heat and soot out the chimney.

A couple of years ago I replaced it with a very high efficiency gas furnace. Long story short: my house minder got a call from our alarm company at midnight one very cold day: low temperature alert. It goes off at 4C (about 40F).

After futzing around for a couple of hours with the repairman on the line, he knocked the block of ice off the furnace exhaust and it started working immediately.

So two thongs:

- OP mentioned gas furnace - be aware of this problem of blocked exhaust. We now know it's common in very cold weather

and

- my alarm company thinks anything below 40F is a bad thing.

Big plumbing concern for maintaining a low temperature in a house during winter is similar to what was earlier posted - pipes in outside walls or running in unheated areas. I know people who have had burst pipes in some rooms, even while they were living there. They closed off the rooms to "save money", not thinking about the plumbing.

Even maintaining around 50 degrees, you should open doors and cabinets of rooms that have plumbing in them, either as bathroom fixtures or running through the walls. Let the air circulate to avoid cold spots.

Basements that are kept warm with oil or gas furnaces can still have burst pipes, again the pipes that are in a far corner and/or running along an outside wall.

A friend has his house alarm system also monitor the temperature in two places in the house - in the kitchen, and in the "furnace room" (closet where furnace and a lot of plumbing is). It works very well, and has warned him of temperatures getting too low.

Bendder thinks that "but drop the temp and air gets dry" and jbrad13 thinks "Nothing below 55 or you risk severe condensation"??? Granted one is in Ontario and the other is in OH. Why do people add humidifiers to their heating systems if Bendder is correct?
OP, all I can tell you is that I've been setting on 40 for five winters without any problems but it is a new very air tight house.

Thanks Tom.sounds like some expensive lessons learned.

It depends on where you are, how the house was built, and how cold it gets.

Where I live, with many homes plumbed on the assumptions from "normal" lows, we have plumbing freeze-ups in some houses when temperatures drop below 0 F for a day or more (about 20 F below "normal" lows) even while the occupant is running the furnace full time to try to maintain comfortable temperatures in the 65F to 70F range. For homes on slabs, kitchen plumbing sometimes comes up in outer walls, and sometimes long runs are made in the attic, which will stay above freezing with heat losses during "normal" lows.

Crawl space plumbing does better if vents are closed to contain heat, basement plumbing seldom freezes in a house heated to any temperature above freezing, but you have to watch out for runs in outer walls.

Then you need to re-think your assumption that the house is heated to NN F temperature. One January I took a cruise to a warmer place, and an ice storm took out power for several days, followed by a near zero to sub-zero spell. The service line to my house was pulled down by falling limbs, so power stayed out even after the distribution system was brought back up. Damage from water running out of burst pipes exceeded $10,000 and I had to pay the city several hundred dollars for the water that filled the house before I got home.

I left a house empty but climate controlled (60F in winter and 85F in summer) while working on another continent for two years (college daughter needed to come home to it) but I also had daily walk-arounds and weekly inspections with exercise of plumbing and adjustment of lighting timers. It cost about $100 a month (on top of monitoring fee) but it was worth it, as the inspections caught a couple of plumbing problems that could have gotten quite expensive. Thinking I could just walk away from a house for 10-12 days in winter, after retirement, turned out to be a much more expensive mistake.

I grew up in Michigan. Houses there, at least those I lived in and summer homes particularly, were designed to be winterized cold, just like a RV. Water supply can be cut off, all lines drained. If your house can do that, I advise it, even if you don't plan to let it go cold.

If you don't want to winterize, rather leave it warm, then have somebody watching the house, checking on it, with authority to spend for repairs needed to protect the house.

Tennessee is not Michigan (where I let a winterized empty house go into cold storage) or NE Oklahoma (where winters are not usually cold but can get Minnesota cold for a few days to a few weeks). So my experience does not fully translate.

I don't really have a choice. Our programmable thermostat limits the lowest setting to 54 degrees. I'm fortunate to have a couple of close friends who check on the house a few times a week. I also have a auto dial monitor in the house that will rotate through a series of programmed telephone numbers if the temperature drops below 45 degrees or if the electrical power is interrupted for more than 5 minutes. So far, that has only happened once in the last 5 years when the furnace malfunctioned.