68°F while you are home and awake, and 60 to 62°F overnight or when the house is empty. Never go below about 55°F, even when you leave town, because that is where pipes inside exterior walls start to freeze. If you heat with a heat pump rather than a gas furnace, hold a steady temperature instead and keep any setback to two or three degrees, or the system will answer with expensive electric backup heat. For a furnace that is not keeping up, call (414) 429-5333 and Hub City will connect you with an independent local HVAC pro.
Sixty-eight degrees is the number the US Department of Energy has recommended for decades, and it is still the right starting point for a Lubbock house. What makes it work especially well here is the size of our daily swing: a January day on the South Plains can start in the 20s and reach the upper 50s by mid-afternoon, with a lot of sun in between. A house allowed to coast down overnight, then warmed by that afternoon sun, spends far fewer furnace minutes than one held flat at 72°F.
What is the right winter thermostat setting, hour by hour?
For a gas or electric furnace, this schedule covers most households:
- Awake and home: 68°F. Comfortable for most people in a sweater, and the baseline every savings figure is measured from.
- Asleep: 60 to 62°F. Most people sleep better cooler anyway, and the drop happens while nobody notices.
- Out of the house all day: 62°F. No reason to heat an empty living room, and recovery is quick in a reasonably tight house.
- Away overnight or longer: 58 to 60°F, and never under 55°F. More on that limit below.
If 68°F genuinely feels cold, resist the urge to push the number up. In a West Texas winter the problem usually is not the air temperature at all.
How much does a setback actually save?
The Department of Energy's figure is roughly one percent off the heating portion of your bill for every degree of setback held for about eight hours. An eight-degree overnight drop, every night of a heating season, is a visible difference rather than loose change: a cooler house loses heat to the outdoors more slowly, so the furnace runs fewer total minutes.
The old objection — that the furnace works harder on recovery and cancels out the saving — does not hold for a furnace, which delivers the same heat per minute either way and simply runs a longer stretch to catch up. It does have teeth for heat pumps.
Furnace running constantly and still not reaching 68°F?One call and we'll connect you with a local Lubbock HVAC pro.
📞 (414) 429-5333Is it different if I have a heat pump?
Yes, and this is the most common thermostat mistake in homes with a heat pump. A heat pump moves heat rather than burning fuel, and it works most efficiently holding a steady temperature. Ask it to climb five or eight degrees in a hurry and the control board does the easy thing: it switches on the electric auxiliary heat strips, which cost several times more per unit of heat delivered.
So with a heat pump: pick one temperature, hold it, and keep any night setback to two or three degrees. If your thermostat is labeled heat-pump compatible and has adaptive or smart recovery, switch it on — it starts the climb early and gradually so the strips never engage. Weighing the two systems? Our comparison of heat pumps and furnaces in West Texas covers the trade-offs.
How low is too low when I leave town?
About 55°F is the floor, and higher if a hard freeze is forecast. The thermostat reads a hallway, not the inside of an exterior wall cavity, the cabinet under a sink on an outside wall, or an unheated garage. Those spaces run much colder, and they are where supply lines burst — for far more than the gas you saved.
Before a winter trip, open interior doors and the cabinet doors under sinks on exterior walls so heated air reaches the plumbing, leave the thermostat at 58 to 60°F rather than off, and ask someone to look in if a cold snap is coming. Heat failing while the house drops toward freezing is an emergency, not a next-week repair — see what counts as an HVAC emergency in Lubbock.
Why does 68°F feel cold in a Lubbock house?
Usually one of three reasons, all cheaper to fix than running the furnace hotter.
- The air is too dry. Heating already-dry West Texas air can push indoor relative humidity into the teens, and dry air pulls heat off your skin so 68°F reads as 64°F. Winter humidity in the 30 to 40 percent range usually does more for comfort than two degrees on the thermostat — see whole-home humidifiers in Lubbock's dry air.
- The warm air is going into the attic. Leaky ducts can lose a fifth to a third of everything the system moves — see leaky air ducts and Lubbock energy bills.
- Airflow is restricted. A filter loaded with caliche dust or cotton-harvest lint starves the return and the house heats unevenly. Check it monthly here, not every 90 days.
One more setting worth getting right: leave the fan on AUTO, not ON. In winter, ON keeps circulating air between burner cycles, which feels like a draft.
Who should I call in Lubbock?
Hub City Heating & Air is a referral service, not a contractor, so we do not perform repairs or installations ourselves. Call (414) 429-5333 and we will connect you with an independent local HVAC pro who does. You can start from our furnace and heating repair page, our AC repair page or our AC replacement page, or request a callback and we will reach out. Scheduling, pricing and any guarantees are set by the independent contractor, and costs vary — call for a quote.
If the furnace has not run since spring, find out now whether it will hold 68°F — not on the first freezing night. Our fall furnace prep guide for Lubbock is the short list to work through first.
Frequently asked questions
What should I set my thermostat to in winter in Lubbock?
Set it to 68 degrees while you are home and awake, and 60 to 62 degrees overnight or while the house is empty. That is the long-standing US Department of Energy guidance and it holds up well in Lubbock, where sunny afternoons often do part of the work for you. If 68 feels cold, the usual culprit is dry air or a draft rather than the number on the wall, so try raising humidity and sealing the obvious leaks before you climb to 72.
How much does turning the thermostat down overnight actually save?
The Department of Energy puts it at roughly one percent off the heating portion of your bill for every degree of setback held for about eight hours. An eight-degree overnight setback, held every night of a Lubbock heating season, is a real line-item difference rather than pennies. The savings come from the simple fact that a cooler house loses heat to the outdoors more slowly than a warm one, so the furnace runs fewer total minutes.
Is the winter thermostat setting different if I have a heat pump?
Yes. Keep a heat pump at a steady temperature and limit any setback to about two or three degrees. A deep setback makes the system climb a long way on recovery, and most heat pumps answer that by switching on electric auxiliary heat, which costs far more per hour of heat than the heat pump itself. If your thermostat is labeled heat pump compatible and offers adaptive or smart recovery, turn that on so it ramps up gradually instead of calling for strip heat.
How low can I set the thermostat when I leave town in winter?
Do not go below about 55 degrees, and keep it higher than that if a hard freeze is forecast. Below roughly 55 degrees the indoor temperature inside exterior walls, crawl spaces and unheated garages can drop to freezing even while the thermostat reads comfortably above it, and a burst supply line costs vastly more than the heat you saved. Leave interior doors and sink cabinet doors open so warm air reaches the pipes, and have someone check the house if you will be gone through a cold snap.
Does setting the thermostat higher heat the house faster?
No. A single-stage furnace produces exactly one level of heat output whether you ask for 70 degrees or 85, so setting it to 85 does not warm the house any sooner. It only means the furnace keeps running past the point you actually wanted and overshoots, which wastes gas and is the most common reason a house ends up uncomfortably hot an hour after someone got impatient.