All,
I recently purchased a property in the mountains as a vacation home. It is two stories plus a basement. It has no central air, and just electric baseboard heat. It is at a rather high elevation for where I live (4500 ft above sea level) and thus gets very cold in the winter.
As baseboard heat is very expensive, I'd prefer to only heat the areas of the house that I have to when not there. The only reason to heat any of the house is to prevent the pipes from freezing.
Is there a strategy I can use to only heat rooms where pipes run through them, or should I simply resort to setting all baseboard thermostats to the lowest setting (50 degrees)? I've thought about buying a Seek Thermal imager for my iPhone and tracing the hot water pipes through the walls, but those aren't cheap, so unless I'll really be able to not heat certain rooms I'd rather not spend that $$$.
Thanks so much for any help you can provide!