Thermostats that are programmable will help save on your utility bill.

One of these thermostats can help you reduce cooling and heating costs by as much as 20 percent by automatically lowering the temperature of your apartment or house 5 degrees at night and 10 degrees during the day, thereby reducing the need for any utility bill assistance you may have.

A good programmable thermostat will cost between $50 and $90. That is all it will cost to save as much as 20%.

Note, if your home does have several cooling or heating zones, such as a finished basement or attic, strongly consider a programmable thermostat for each zone.

How could this possibly be this effective?
It is easy. Say for example you go to bed at 10 p.m.. You can set up/program your furnace to automatically change from 70 degrees to 65 degrees at that time using a programmable thermostat.

Then say you wake up at 6:30 in the morning every day. You can program the system to increase the temperature again at 6 a.m., enough time to heat the home before you wake.  It is great for those cold winter mornings. Then the thermostat can go back down to 65 or even lower when you leave the house to go to work at say 8am.

And best of all, the system works exactly the same way for summer cooling savings. You just set it to raise the temperature while you and your family are sleeping or are away from home to cut AC costs and reduce utility bills.

Convenience and energy savings galore

The number one feature you might notice first is the great convenience - as you will never have to worry about forgetting to turn the thermostat down when you leave the house or down at night.

It is also a great deterrent to those family members who use the thermostat when they get a small chill as everything is preprogrammed

But of course the benefit you will appreciate the most is the large amount of energy savings and reduced utility bills. As an example, if you program your thermostat to set back the temperature by 10 degrees for eight hours nightly, you will save approximately ten percent on your utility bills. Now this is what I call self assistance with your utility bill.

And of course, if you set it back while you're away from home, say at work, you will see even larger  electric bill savings from your programmable thermostat.