What temperature should my home be during installation?

What you gain by running the house normally

Flooring materials and the adhesives that sometimes go with them are built around a range of ordinary indoor conditions, the kind of temperature a house sits at on a normal day with the heat or the air conditioning doing its usual job. Keep the house in that range through the job and the subfloor, the material, and any adhesive involved all behave the way they were designed to. Wood-based products settle into a stable size instead of shifting again once the heat comes back on for the season, and adhesives cure on the timeline their manufacturer built around. That predictability is the entire reason a normal setting is the right default rather than an exception.

It also keeps the crew working at a reasonable pace in reasonable conditions, which matters more than it sounds like on a job that runs a full day. A house that has been shut down cold to save on heating, or closed up hot in summer, is a harder place to do careful, precise work in for hours at a stretch.

What you give up for it

Running the system normally through install day is not free of tradeoffs. The house is occupied by a crew moving material, cutting boards, and generating dust for however long the job runs, and a working HVAC system pulls some of that dust through the return vents and circulates it elsewhere in the house rather than keeping it contained to the room being worked on. How much dust a given job actually produces is its own question, but running the system at all is part of what decides how far that dust travels beyond the room.

There is also the plain cost of keeping a system running all day during a job that may take longer with a crew working through the house, doors opening and closing repeatedly as material and old flooring move in and out. Neither of those is a reason to shut the system off. They are simply the honest cost side of the choice.

Where the tradeoff flips: unconditioned space

A garage conversion, a three-season room, or a partially finished space that has never had reliable heat or air conditioning is a different situation entirely. There, the choice is not between running the system normally and saving a little on the utility bill. It is between conditioning the space before install day and installing material into conditions the product was never built to handle. What winter specifically changes about that calculation is covered separately, but the underlying rule holds year round: a space that does not sit at an ordinary indoor temperature and humidity needs to get there before, not during, the job.

The honest downside on both sides

Running the house normally is the right call for the large majority of jobs, and it is still not free of cost or mess. Conditioning a previously unconditioned room ahead of an install adds a step and a wait that a finished, heated bedroom never needs. Neither side of this is a shortcut. The right call depends on what kind of room is actually being floored, and that is worth naming out loud before scheduling rather than assuming.

This question is also easy to tangle up with a related but separate one: why certain materials need to sit in the house acclimating before installation even begins. That is a question about the material adjusting to your home's conditions ahead of time, and it has its own answer. Here the question is narrower, about the room's operating temperature during the days the crew is actually working, not the days beforehand.

The mistake this is meant to head off

The mistake worth avoiding is shutting a system down to save money during a job, or cranking it to an extreme to try to speed material along, either one done without asking first. Extremes in either direction stress a subfloor and a fresh installation in ways a normal range does not, and there is no shortcut available in temperature that beats simply running the house the way you normally would.