Marianne Touchie and Helen Stopps have spent a lot of time thinking about thermostats.  “Between Helen and I, I don’t know — hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of hours: it’s hard to put a number on it,” laughs Touchie, an assistant professor in the University of Toronto’s Department of Civil and Mineral Engineering.  The tiny household devices play an outsize role in the research that Touchie and Stopps, a PhD student, are conducting. The duo wants to find out whether so-called smart thermostats could meaningfully reduce energy consumption in Toronto’s high-rise condo towers, which experts suggest has gone largely unchecked — at least until recently.    Read the article………………………