A friend of mine spends 500+ euros per month on gas for heating since he works from home, no way on earth his office uses 500 per person and per month on heat
Even if it's on 8 hours a day constantly, 5 days a week, 4 weeks a month that's 320kWh or just over £100 a month at UK energy prices.
not sure if that makes your anecdote out of date or if it puts further shade on the parents comment.
Granted this is the US, and natural gas is considerably cheaper here than in a lot of countries in Europe right now, so you probably need to at least double what I said anyway for Europe.
I've never heard of anyone heating their home when not in it, given the other comments it seems like it's the norm, weird
OTOH, our houses are generally heavily insulated, so while heating a house is expensive, keeping it heated is relatively cheap. I'm always amazed at the lack of insulation when I travel abroad. I never freeze as much as when I leave Scandinavia (no joke).
I turn the heat down to 55 or so (the lowest the thermostat will go) when I'm away for a few days. But I've never heard of anyone not leaving their heat on some setting for this reason. Do you live somewhere that almost never drops below freezing?
And we only do that because smart thermostats exist and use our phones as presence sensors. Without that, we'd have to manually lower the heat and I doubt we'd bother/remember.
Or do you demand that they live in the cold while you're at the office?
Most people here would need to actively tweak it every time the leave the house and every time they come in. And do it separately for each room. Just from the way how heating works - you have valve in each room that you turn in order to adjust heating.
Of course no one does it every day twice.
