New Thermostat

Yesterday I installed a new digital thermostat in our house. I am excited as it is a nice upgrade over the 40+ year old one that was on the wall. So I figured I would play it safe and kill the power to the furnace, I guess I didn't want to get zapped. Then I went downstairs to get some tools and noticed the smell of natural gas. Of course with the kids in the house I started to panic that I was going to blow up the house. But I figured out that when I shut off the fuse to the furnace the pilot light went out, and when I was reading about how to relight the pilot it said some gas left in the lines might escape and to give it 5 minutes before trying to relight it. So I went back upstairs and installed the thermostat, it was really simple on our house since we don't have air conditioning...heat only was 2 wires to connect. Then I re-lit the pilot light, turned power back on to the furnace and it was up and running. It is pretty cool that you can program the furnace to come on at certain times and then shut off at certain times to cool off the house. The thermostat was programed from the factory with a set up that save an average of 33% on heating bills in a typical house. It drops the temperature down to 60 at night, but warms it back up to 68 at 8 AM when the kids and I usually get up. We'll see how it goes, at least it should give us a little bit of flexibility in our house and hopefully it saves us some energy and money too!