Many people have no clue how thermostats work

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My tenant found the house too cold. I realized that the problem was that I had turned the furnace off at the start of the summer, and had forgotten to turn it back on. But when turning the thermostat up to 70 had produced no result, my tenant then turned it up to 85.

Her view of the thermostat was that it was some sort of magical wish granter: if one wishes for 70, and one's wish is not granted, then perhaps wishing for 85 will result in a grant of the wish for 70.

I don't mean to pick on her: many, many people seem to treat thermostats in this way. They walk into their office, and the temperature is 80. They would like it to be 70, but they want it to "get there fast," so they set the thermostat to 60.

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