We clarify two comments made by Francisco M Fernández on our paper Bhattacharyya and Mitra (2022 Eur. J. Phys.
44 015101). The first one is regarding the calculation of the approximate partition function for a particle in a box that was derived earlier by others, and the second one is about the omission of the contribution to the continuous energy spectrum in the partition function calculation for a particle in a finite well.