Thermostat help
 

My house has central heating with a heat pump that has a backup emergency heat setting. The thermostat for the system was set up about 10 years ago. The LCD display is failing and only about half the letters and numbers are recognizable. So if the temperature is 88, it may display 7L, so many of the little segments are missing. If you know what I mean.

I have the skill to turn off the power, I have basic wiring skills and can probably work out how to remove this thing from the wall. Can I just go to my local megahardware store and get something that will work? What special secret thermostat mojo do I need?

Do you have some of that tape, like the kind you put over the "check engine" light? I think you could use that here, too.

just count the number of wires (ususally 4, IIRC) and make sure the new one expects the same number of wires. The instructions will tell you red to a terminal, white to b... etc.

Shortly after we bought our house I replaced the existing antiquated dial thermostat with a digital programmable one. This was one of my few victories in a long line of failed or incomplete do-it-yourself projects.

If I can do it, I'm sure you can too!

remove the thermostat. take it to a *local* hardware store, where you can talk to somebody who knows what they're doing. this may or may not be the borg (derogatory comment on megahugebigboxhardwarestore). buy what they tell you. This strategy worked *very well* in my recent hardware (guitar) quest.

Almost certainly, any plain thermostat will do the job of monitoring the temperature limits and sending the signal to the furnace to turn on and off.

Great advice. Great advice. I had a recent situation, which I won't bother you with the details of, but suffice it to say: I wanted to hook a dishwasher up to the plumbing where a clothes washer once was. So I needed to reduce from male 1/2" something on this end to something like 5/8" something on the other end. Seems like a simple task: get me from here to there. It's water. It needs to come out here, and go in there. How hard could that be?

BigBorgBox has a convenient huge wall of plumbing widgets, so I need, what would you think, probably two adapters and a hose of some kind. I swear to God I looked at those widgets for at least an hour (I had my brother with me, too; he's a maintenence supervisor, and I used to work for a plumber). Eventually we settled on the "universal adapter hose" and the one additional widget we needed, which they didn't have in stock. We go to find an employee, and maybe thirty minutes and some vague logic pretzel later, we have someone dialing another store, and handing me the phone, so that I can ask if they have the part in stock, but they ask me for all these internal numbers, which I have to ask the employee, so after we do that for a while they get on the phone (to do their job, wow), and find the part, across town. I am to meet a certain guy at a certain store and he will have my part.

I go to the store. He has the wrong part (the exact opposite male/female combination: useless). Incidentally I know this guy: he used to be the bartender at a local dive. Now he is serving up wrong parts. Back to the phone. Back to the part search, they have one maybe an hour away.

I abandon this vendor, and go to a second BigBorgBox chain: new wall of widgets, new game plan, new not-having-the-part-I-need.

Back to the other BigBorgBox, how else can I do it, new game plan, many, many unnecessary adapter to recude from one size to another, and when I get home, they don't work, somehow. Back to the BigBorgBox, returning parts.

New game plan, new not-having-it. Returning everything.

This is the punchline: I go to the local hardware store. Five minutes later I have the parts I need, in my hand.

It really was a simple job after all, just like I knew all long.

Only one bit of advice:

When you remove the thermostat from the wall, make sure you have some masking tape or a clothes pin or binder clip or something to secure the wires so gravity doesn't pull them back into the wall cavity. You will be unhappy if you lose the wires in the wall. This potential problem is less likely if the wires are stapled to a stud near the hole, but you never know how your house was constructed. Don't ask how I know about this.

Installing a new thermostat is easy. Just pay attention to the labels (if any) on the screws of the old thermostat and what color wires were connected to them. Then wire the new one the same way.

If I can do it anyone can. There's only four wires involved and they are color-coded. Its really not that hard once you get past the instructions written in 3pt Arial Narrow font.

Get a good programmable one. Save a buck or two. And, perhaps, an entire planet.

thanks for not bothering us with the details
 

good advise! I am committing this info to memory. Just in case but seeing how I will probably never rewire anything in any wall please tell us how you know about this.


Sorry, I had to ask!

UT, I just did mine and I have a heat pump too. They are different than baseboard electric, gas or oil and require a different thermostat. I bought mine at Lowes. You may have 8 or 9 wires, I forget already, but wiring a heat pump is totally different than the others. I don't know why, but it is. I bought a Honeywell for about $70 it was the cheapest programmable for my current system. After realizing the codes inside did NOT match my system I called the 800# (on a Saturday) and the guy walked me through it in about 10 mins. It was the best easiest thing I've done here so far, and I've had to do a lot. Installed new laminate floor refacing kitchen cabinets, replacing drywall in the ceiling, hanging new doors. . .

A heat pump works by trying to cool outside air - thereby heating inside air. However as outside temperature drops below 40F, the heat pump has little outside heat to pump inside. Therefore (and unlike other heating systems) a heat pump must also have the 'emergency heat' function. That is typically electric heat - very expensive. Thermostat must have extra functions to control that 'emergency heat' function.

Heat pumps generally are most efficient at latitudes and temperatures of North Carolina.

Even in North Carolina, you get plenty of time under 40F!

Thermostats operate on different voltages depending on the system. When you take it apart it should be labeled. Since we're having a warm spell, take the sucker with you. Also take the info on the system, just in case.
Yeah, don't let the cable drop in the hole and don't let the wires touch each other. Piece of cake. :D

Ah-HA!! I always wondered what the hell the "Em. Heat" setting was and how it was supposed to be different from the plain ol' "Heat" setting. We're more appropriate for a heat pump than North Carolina--I think it might have dropped below 40 overnight once or twice this winter. On the other hand, our heater is definitely already electric, so I don't understand how the emergency heat function would be any more expensive...?