What temperature should you leave an empty cottage at in winter?
Updated
It’s the question you ask closing up the cottage in November, hand on the thermostat: how low can I go without risking a frozen pipe? You’ll find numbers all over the internet. None of them knows your cottage, your plumbing or your insurance policy — and those are what decide the right answer.
What to do before you pick a setting
1. Read what your insurance policy says
Start there. The Insurance Bureau of Canada puts it plainly: when you’re away during the normal heating season, many insurers require the plumbing to be drained or the home to be checked regularly to confirm the heat is still on. Some policies also name a specific setting. If your policy names one, that’s the one that counts. If it says nothing, ask your broker how often the home has to be checked, and get the answer in writing.
2. Ask your plumber
A plumber who knows your system knows where the most exposed pipes run: the north wall, the crawl space, a cantilevered bathroom, an addition built on an old porch. They can recommend a setting that protects those spots, not just the room with the thermostat.
3. Measure the coldest room, not just the living room
A thermostat reads the room it’s in. Put a stand-alone thermometer — ideally one that records the minimum — in the coldest room: the basement, the cabinet under a sink on an exterior wall, a north-facing bedroom. Compare it with the thermostat after a few cold days. The gap is often the real information.
4. Check every heating zone
Plenty of Québec cottages are heated with electric baseboards and a thermostat in each room. A setting in the living room does nothing for the back bedroom. Walk through: every thermostat, every room, interior doors left ajar so heat can move.
5. Plan for the heat stopping
The best setting is useless during an outage. Know where the main shut-off is, whether your plumber recommends turning the water off while you’re away, and who can stop by after a storm.
Why there’s no universal number
Every cottage loses heat its own way. A log cottage, a well-insulated newer build and an old three-season place that’s been added onto cool down at very different rates. Windows, air leaks and wind on the façade matter as much as the setting.
Pipes don’t live at the thermostat. What freezes is a pipe in an exterior wall or crawl space, where it’s far colder than the main room. A setting that looks careful on the main floor can be too low for a walk-out basement in Sutton or a cottage on piers in Potton.
Townships cold varies with elevation. A cottage on the side of Mont Sutton or up in the Frelighsburg hills doesn’t get the same winter as a house in the village. Cold snaps, wind and mild spells land differently from one valley to the next.
Too low saves little and risks a lot. Hydro-Québec advises lowering the temperature in unoccupied rooms to cut the heating bill. But the savings don’t weigh much against a burst pipe found at the next thaw.
Humidity matters too. A closed-up house with little heat holds moisture. Condensation on windows or a stale smell in spring are signs it was too cold or too closed up.
Prevention: what you can do, and what belongs to the trades
What an owner can do:
- Follow your insurer’s setting, or the one your plumber recommends, and write it down next to the thermostat.
- Leave a minimum-recording thermometer in the coldest room.
- Open interior doors and the cabinet doors under sinks on exterior walls.
- Check propane or oil levels before leaving and schedule deliveries — including a ploughed driveway.
- Replace batteries in thermostats and stand-alone thermometers every fall.
What belongs to an RBQ-licensed contractor:
- Adding permanent supplementary heat to a cold zone (master electrician).
- Insulating or rerouting pipes exposed to the cold (plumber).
- Annual servicing of a furnace, heat pump or propane appliance.
- Fully draining the plumbing if the cottage is closed for winter with no heat.
In an empty house, how long before anyone notices?
A setting doesn’t defend itself. A tripped breaker, a thermostat with a dead battery, a baseboard that quits, a propane tank run dry: the house cools down and nobody’s there to feel it. A connected thermostat can alert you, as long as the power and internet hold.
How often someone stops by sets how long a cottage can sit too cold without anyone knowing. If your insurer requires regular visits while the home is unoccupied, the exact conditions vary from policy to policy: ask your broker.
What we look at on a visit
Every visit, we read the main thermostat and compare it with the setting we agreed on, then read the thermometer left in the coldest room to track the gap from one visit to the next. We check that the heating equipment is running, read the propane or oil gauge if the heat depends on it, look at the incoming water line for frost, and log the hygrometer reading. Everything is photographed and time-stamped.
If the temperature is dropping or something won’t start, we call you the same day, and bring in an RBQ-licensed tradesperson if needed.