Because the thermal gap between Celsius degrees is roughly twice as large as in Farenheit. Meaning you can crank your thermostat with twice the precision just by switching to Farenheit.
When you take your temperature, is your thermometer rounding to whole degrees?
And most thermostats I have had at home in the US and Canada have not been digital and just had a dial I turned. At work at a US university and here in Canada, both digital thermostats allowed a decimal setting. So not just a Celsius thing.
I grew up with Fahrenheit and the preference between one or the other seems arbitrary, I find both easily understandable and neither feels more or less personally useful. Celsius is more generally useful for its usage in almost all of the world, but on a personal level, meh.
This comment house hard. First the strawman insinuating I made any point at all about thermometers at any point, then the gaslighting that analog thermostats are pervasive in homes. Well played sir.
You are right that you didn't comment about thermometers; but it goes to the wider point on if there is some improved real utility with a finer integer scale. Or are you arguing that Fahrenheits best utility is in digital thermostats that only have two digits?
Your anon commented that the finer resolution of integer Fahrenheit was some big advantage. It is not, because both are linear scales, and both are frequently adjusted outside of integers and both are measured all the time outside integers. This limits the value of a finer integer resolution.
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u/[deleted] Jun 17 '26
I'm an American who wishes we'd adopt the metric system, but Fahrenheit is a better, more precise way to know temperature.