Home Improvement Success

I successfully added value to my home today, and it felt good.

The undergraduate students in my program are raising money to go to the big national conference in our field, which is happening in about two weeks in The Most Boring Possible Conference City Ever. In any case, in order to raise money, the students who wanted to go decided to basically rent themselves out as a group to do odd jobs for anyone who would hire them.

I thought that this was a great idea, and initially thought that I would have them come over and we could do a whole bunch of outdoor yard work - leaves, pruning, weeding, etc...basically getting the exterior of the place ready for the winter. Great plan, except for the part where it frakking rains in New England for eight straight days.

So I needed to come up with some indoor activities for them to do. This really wasn't about getting too much work out of them, but rather supporting their efforts to go to the conference. These are mostly students that I've had in class and enjoyed interacting with a great deal.

So, we decided to have them repaint a piece of furniture that we had, clean the windows in our sun room, and scrub our dining room furniture down.

So, I got up this morning and went to Home Depot to buy some supplies for the gang coming over, and of course I never can get in and out of Home Depot cleanly. This time I ended up ogling those nifty EnergyStar compliant programmable thermostats - you know, the ones that claim to save you 33% on your heating bills if you use them properly. With the combination of very old windows, an ancient heating system, and skyrocketing fuel costs, I thought that one of these might not be a bad idea.

I selected a Honeywell 5-1-1 type, meaning that you can select different programs for Monday-Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. I went with Honeywell basically because every thermostat that I've seen in New England pretty much is the old-school round Honeywell-type, as depicted here.

Now, I have had several friends install these in their own homes or apartments, and the instructions on the package make this seem like something one can do one oneself. I mean, seriously, the instructions on the front of the package literally say: 1.) Remove Old Thermostat. 2.) Mount Wallplate and Connect New Wires. 3.) Install New Thermostat and Set Program. I have a frakking Ph.D. in engineering, so one would think I could follow those instructions.

Anyway, the instructions inside the package are a bit more detailed, and assume that you have a nice, old, round Honeywell thermostat which you are disconnecting. They give you helpful diagrams about wire placement, and how to disconnect the old wires and map them to the new.

This is where the fun begins.

As with any project involving electrical circuits, you should turn off power to item before you start hacking at it. So, I go downstairs to look at the cicuit breaker box, and of course, ours is completely unlabeled. No idea what circuit the boiler is on. So, I go upstairs, crank the heat until the boiler kicks on, and then run back to the panel and start flipping circuits until the thing kicks off. Easy enough - circuit found.

Now, I go to remove the old thermostat from the wall. This proves to be easier said than done, since the old faceplate has been alternately painted, wallpapered, and repainted to the wall over the course of the eons that it has apparently been in place. Apparently Honeywell was the first company in existence, and this thermostat was their first product.

This step doesn't go particularly well, as in the act of trying to remove the old thermostat from the wall, it breaks. So we better damn well hope that the new one works, because the old one ain't going back into place.

So, I look at the old mounting plate, the one that the oh-so-helpful instructions say will tell me what is wired to what, so that I can intelligently migrate the wires from old to new. Except that my old mounting plate is a blank piece of plastic. There are exactly two (ancient, cloth-covered) wires, one black and one white, attached to this non-descript piece of plastic.

I'm starting to sweat a little here, but I avoid cursing, as I do have a houseful of my students around, remember. Luckily, one of them is an electrical engineer, and I press him into service to help me figure out what the hell I am going to do now.

The new thermostat has no fewer than 8 or 10 terminals to which wires can be connected, so I figure that randomly connecting the two that I have will not be a viable solution.

At this point, I figure I need help, so we call our oil guy, a saint of a man who has been very gracious in answering our questions about the ancient heating system in the house. I get on the phone with him, and he tells me to connect one wire to the terminal marked "R" and one to the terminal marked "W", and that should do it. I ask him "Does it matter which goes where?" He replies, "Nope."

This is why home wiring bugs me. Everyone seems pretty nonchalant about it, yet it seems pretty important. If I have a chemical plant, and I start flowing things the wrong way, bad things can happen, but apparently, in my home thermostat with only two wires, it doesn't matter which one goes where. OK.

So my electrical engineering cohort strips back the wires and inserts them into the terminals, securing them. We mount the plate onto the wall, install the batteries into the fancy digital faceplate, and snap it back into place. I run downstairs and flip the breaker back on, and come back upstairs. The panel is now live.

Moment of truth. The thermostat reads 74 F. I push the 'up' button until the system is set at 75 F. The boiler clicks on. Success!

So, all it took was one Ph.D. engineer, an undergrad EE major, and one call to the local oil company guy, and we got our fanccy new digital programmable thermostat working. Let the energy saving commence...