I’ve done it in the same day. Annoying!
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Summer was not really there in London. I kinda kept the thermostat working but at a different range. I was wearing a coat for a while but then I generally wear a t-shirt unless I go for a meeting.
Yesterday
Turned it on this am. Got to 61 F and both Mini T-2 and I were chilly! Turned it off once it hit 66 and I’ve been fine since
First blast of central heat downstairs in our house was 2-3 weeks ago, although the use has been limited. (Really, it’s always “on”, but it’s only Oct/Nov - March/April that it’s cold enough for the theromostat to trigger.)
Upstairs, which is really just my office space, where there is no central air, where electronics in my office and the sun can keep things very warm…yesterday was the day where I looked at the 14-day weather forecast and decided it was time to pull the A/C out of the window and bump up the thermostat from minimum. Even so, I regretted having a couple of early meetings this morning where I had to have the camera on, and it wouldn’t have looked good to have been under a blanket.
Turned the heat on a couple days ago. Brought in the fragile plants today. Could have waited another day to do that, but with rain in the AM tomorrow and turkey in the afternoon I know that I’m not going to feel like dragging them in with a full belly
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We turned ours on about a week and a half ago, forgot to note it here. House gets down to about 64 at night, so we bump it to 70 in the morning, then turn it off for the rest of the day.
Bump: had ours on yesterday. “Cold spell” here means that the high outside never reaches 65 degrees.
Will get up to 80 next week. Cool! I mean, hot!
Might need a “post when you first put on air conditioning 2025” thread soon.
We are in the fun part of the year where it’s common to run both the heat and the AC in a given day. But we have the heat pump, and it’s usually just loping along at a low speed one way or the other.
We generally start up the AC a little before the annual servicing to see if there are any issues. Just a test fire.
Reminds me, I need to clean my coil this weekend. I’ll have to clean it again once the cottonwoods do their thing.
Glad I have a thermostat that allows me to run both the heater and ac when needed. Set to a low of 68 and a high of 73.
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OK, re this: I have an old HVAC with an old thermostat – battery-operated, one or the other (heat or A/C) only, can be programmed (5 weekday / 2 weekend), but I want more flexibility (wife has Fridays off, so no need that day for the heater to turn on at 5:45AM for her shower).
So, I’m looking at new thermostats, with wife-fi controls (her phone). Most of these come with a “red wire” (R-wire) for hot electricity. The current setup doesn’t have a red wire.
So, amateur electricians: do I need to have this “red wire” connected to the HVAC system (20 feet away in the garage) or can I connect it to a nearby source (light switch) which happens to be below the thermostat location? Probably wrong voltage.
Or, should I simply replace the dumb thermostat with a similar dumb thermostat with better features?
Google AI had a ton of info. reddit had a thread about this. Something about the C-wire? Maybe there is an R-wire in the wall behind the thermostat that isn’t used?
I shouldn’t have to contract an HVAC specialist for this, should I? They will want me to replace all of it (came with the house, now 42 years old).
home depot web page:
Still not sure.
Red is typically used for the R wires, which do provide power, but not continuously.
Most smart thermostats (the ones that can be controlled from an app) need a C wire, typically black, which provides 24V power continuously. I want to say there’s a variant of Nest that has a mechanism to operate off a battery and/or which provides a mechanism to address the lack of a C wire…but I’m not certain.
I also should disclose that my attempts to self-install thermostats led to three fried smart thermostats, and now I let the professionals do the installation.
In fairness, the three fried thermostats were the result of some kind of gadget not having been installed when the boiler or central air unit was replaced…
I did discover that the techs hate Nests and Ecobees for various reasons / relatively high failure rates. They prefer Honeywell, which does have a smart model…but annoyingly it’s not smart enough to inhibit AC operation when it’s too cool outside (the main reason I wanted our main thermostat to be smart).
Um, what?
Also: windows?? Yes, smart windows!
The one I’m looking at is a Honeywell. The old one, which I assume is also 42 years old, is unknown at this time.
Thermostat is a Hunter
HVAC is a Payne.
I see two sets of wires to the HVAC panel. Kind of unusual, and my electrician friend seems reluctant to take it on in exchange for a nice bottle of wine.
I think I’ll ask him for a recommendation if he is unwilling to take it on.
My wife is always hot. She’s not comfortable being hot.
Before I got our first smart thermostat, she would ice over our old A/C compressor 3 or 4 times a year, in the spring or in the fall, by trying to cool the house when it was too cool outside.
Windows aren’t a viable option, partly due to severe arachnophobia (in fairness, she did nearly die from MRSA brought on by a bad spider bite), allergies, and airport noise.
Got it.
menopause?
So I don’t know thermostats. I installed several Emerson Sensi thermostats and they aren’t bad. The good thing is the walk through in the app. It literally asks you ‘which of these wires do you have?’ And you click on the various colors of wires poking out of the wall. And then it says ‘plug the red one into #4, plug the yellow one into #7, etc.’