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Austin Energy offers those sorts of thermostats. It's a program you voluntarily sign up for, and you get a free programmable thermostat--about a $150 value if you're replacing the crappy old kind, plus the added monthly electrical savings of programming your A/C not to run as much during the day when no one's home, which can be very significant in Texas. Under our program, they are not allowed to turn it off for more than 10 minutes at a time, and there's a limit on how many times they can turn you off as well. They provide stats each year on how many times they had to do it the previous year. It happened a total of three times for us over two years, and we never noticed any of them.
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