"Andrew Gabriel" wrote in message
news
Having looked around recently, most new ones nowadays only go down
to 16C.

16 C really is well into chocolate teapot territory, since you may well let
the temperature get lower than that if you go away on holiday in the winter.
It seems daft to have to heat an uninhabited house to 16 deg, when anything
above about 5 deg is fine to prevent pipes freezing, simply for the sake of
keeping the freezer happy.

As an aside, I was surprised when we went away on holiday for three weeks
over Christmas, and the outside temp got down to around freezing some of the
time, that the inside temp never got down as low as the 14 deg that we'd set
the thermostat at, so the heating never came on. That was just due to heat
of the sun and heat from houses either side in the terrace. We have a
weather station which uploads inside and outside temps to the web, so it was
weird to be able to keep an eye on things back home when we were on a cruise
liner in temps that never went below about 30 deg C outside.