We’re continuing to explore new climate data collected inside and outside homes across the United States. Starting in March 2013, 50 participants in the Wild Life of Our Homes project kindly installed small data loggers inside and outside their home to record temperature and humidity.
We recently downloaded the first three months of collected data, and with each new pass at the data, we’re finding interesting relationships and patterns. Check out this new figure produced by Lauren Nichols:
Here you can see the average March-April temperature inside homes (the vertical y-axis) plotted against the average March-April temperature outside homes (the horizontal x-axis) in different states. Any state, represented by its abbreviation, falling along the grey line – shout out to Hawaii, Nevada and Mississippi – had the same average temperature inside and outside the home.
With the exception of Arizona, all other homes were warmer inside than outside for the months of March and April; note that these states fall above the grey line. While the average temperature outside was about the same in Utah and Kansas (in the center of the figure), the indoor thermostat seems to have been set about 5 degrees warmer in Kansas.
And what about Minnesota and Arizona? While the temperature outside was a good 18 degrees C colder in Minnesota, the temperature inside was almost identical at a comfortable 21 degrees C.
So I’m thinking maybe we need to take a look at out thermostat settings; We are keeping things a little too toasty. Thanks for the update, and the very interesting results!
I’m trying to figure out why Washington, Michigan, Maine and Rhode Island are all clustered together? Any theories from you? I’ll go dig up information…