If you don’t know, a programmable thermostat allows you to ‘setback’ your home’s temperature for the nighttime while everyone is in bed, or during the day while everyone is away at work or school.
So how low is too low? That all depends on what kind of furnace you have.
If you have a combustion furnace – which means it uses natural gas, propane, kerosene or fuel oil – then studies show that there is no setting that is too low, so long as it’s not so low that your pipes freeze. Really it’s more a question of how long does it take your home to heat back up to where you want it? You can let your home get, say, down to 55 degrees Fahrenheit, while everyone is out of the house. Then just make sure that you set it to heat back up with enough time so that when you turn that front door key, you walk into a nice comfortable home.
However, if you heat your home with a heat pump, the same is not necessarily true. Setbacks for a heat pump shouldn’t usually be more than 3 or 4 degrees. That’s because of two things. One is that the heat produced from a heat pump is much cooler than that produced by a combustion furnace, so it’ll take much longer for your home to warm back up.
The other is that most heat pumps use a secondary heat source for when the heat pump just can’t produce enough heat fast enough to satisfy the thermostat setting. That secondary heat is usually an electric strip (just like an electric space heater), which produces good heat but is very expensive to run. So, if your heat pump is struggling to warm your home back up after a big temperature setback, that just might kick in the secondary heat which will throw out whatever savings you achieved by making your home colder in the first place.
This is a link to a great article about this, if you care to read all the details: http://www.homeenergy.org/show/article/id/566/viewFull/yes#sthash.e2uJ6daY
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