From “Ask Kit!”:
Q: Do you turn off your heat at night or keep it on?
A: It seems to me that if you need heat in the winter it’s prudent to leave it on day and night. For guest comfort you’d leave it on for sure.
One solution to your question about climate control is to have individual climate control in each guestroom. Individual climate control allows each guest to have a temperature they are most comfortable with during their stay.
For environmental reasons I would ask guests to be sure to moderate the room temperature (turn heat down or AC up) as well as turn lights and the TV off while they are away for the day. Another benefit of individual climate control is that you can moderate a unit (heat down in the winter, AC up in summer or off) in unused rooms saving money and natural resources.
One of the best solutions, assuming you can or do have multiple heating and AC zones, is to install automatic setback thermostats. This allows you to program several heating/cooling cycles per day for each zone.
Example: heat comes on at 5:30 am to 70 degrees. At 10 am when guests have left for their activities, the thermostat drops down to 68 degrees (also makes you sweat less when cleaning). Then at 2:30 the thermostat starts another cycle to 70 again in time for new arrivals and stays at 70 until 10pm. It then drops to 66 for the night for sleeping comfort until the next morning at 5:30.
Overall heating energy savings are 10% and at today’s high energy prices, this could be significant.
Unless you have multiple heating zones which are common on New England homes, you won’t have the ability to do this in different areas of the house, however , even with only one furnace, the above type of cycle works great.