Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler Could use advice on programmable thermostat

As the title says, need some input on a Tstat in the 100 to 150 range. I am brand agnostic but cannot justify a NEST or similar , what say you

With the amount of hacking that goes on these days, I prefer to keep my internet away from my thermostat.

I have a programmable one that was designed to interface with my Lenox gas furnace. But I have a 4 program per day tstat in my garage for my radiant heater. I have that set to default to 10 degrees so that the garage don't get too cold over wintertime. When I go into the garage to do my woodworking, I simply turn the temp up knowing that it will automaticaly reset down to the 10deg mark in about 4 hours.

I gather you are wanting this for a home. I don't see the need to be able to adjust the house temp while away from the home. I think it's a bit of a gimic. The idea that while you are away on vacation you can set the house to warm up before you get home (or cool down) is a bit moot. Remember that if you don't have someone checking your house daily while you are away, then your house insurance is void if say a pipe breaks etc.

I have one now that came with the house and its acting flaky so i will replace it to be safe. I live in the Yukon and the house is 2000ish square feet and i spent less than 100.00 a month on fuel last year so i firmly believe in not heating a house all day while at work and while i am asleep. I have been here 20yrs and have had a programmable as long as i can remember. I told the wife , if your cold you can always vacuum .

Richard, are there any government programs aimed at energy efficiency that might be offered to offset the cost?

The gov has a energy efficiency grants for larger products like fridges etc but that is about it.I will have to do some research i suppose then suffer with my choice if i make a mistake. Sadly my washer failed and we spent all day saturday lookin at washers and we bought a GE it works very good but is bit noisier than our last on but it is direct drive and i suspect thats why it is noisier but it has 10 yr warranty on the motor and its in the basement so no biggy. Off to search the interweb

Interesting, as in Ontario there are incentives for programmable thermostats

i will look into that for sure, thanks good suggestion. I ordered and ecobee3 lite seems to be a good alternative , hardly low cost but i cant trust the one i have. It has no reset and works intermittently and that cant fly given our winter temps. Buying cheap usually means buying twice.

Does your Ecobee have a swing setting or configurable hysteresis? The swing setting is the max number of times the heating source turns on every hour. The hysteresis is how far the temperature falls before the furnace turns on and rises before it shuts off.

I have the ecobee lite but i dont use the smart feature because no one is home all day so i just use regular scheduling. Heat differential can be .3 .6 .8 1.1 celcius. I just looked i dont see anything for a swing setting. Honestly the furnace is going to come on as many times as it needs to keep the heat within the specified range of hysteresis and is controlled by how efficient your home is and the outside temp.

Thanks for checking, Richard. The hysteresis settings should work fine as you say.

honestly other than the ability to control with my phone it offers no improvement over a 60 dollar programmable stat from canadian tire. Also because i have only a 2 wire furnace i had to add a device called a fastat that mimics a 3rd wire so the ecobee can be powered by the furnace. Not only that the instrucions were wrong about where the 3rd wire went and i only figured it out after a 45 minute online chat with a tech when he inadvertently mentioned which terminal was to be used.

That is truly sad to hear. I purchased a Rona 7-day programmable 8 years ago for $16 on sale. It has swing settings and it's been very reliable. I would have preferred hysteresis settings but it works well enough.

i have been trying different settings ,it came set to .5 degree setting so i did that for a month but it was a real cold month,the next month i tried 1.5 degrees and raised the temp by .5 degree but it still a little chilly before the furnace comes on and i did that for a month. i am trying 1 degree see how the comfort part goes. so hard to tell fuel wise because the weather is so inconsistent. personally i think 1 degree is a good compromise.

You'd be better off getting a Tekmar boiler control. Just get simple two temp t-stats for evening set back temp. The Tekmar will moderate boiler water temp off outdoor temp. Great for reducing fuel usage.

I used to use a Nest. I had a two wire thermostat at my old home. The nest would "vampire" the furnace. Pulsing it rapidly, too fast for the furnace to engage, just long enough to get some electricity for the nest battery. It worked fine.
I moved into a new home last year. Two wire thermostat. Installed the nest and was unlucky to receive a huge electricity bill. The nest did not play nice with the new furnace and caused it run too often(without heat coming on).
I ran a new 3 wire thermostat cable, but now my nest would not work at all. I dealt with customer support and found out that it had failed. I seemed to be a common problem with my generation nest.
If you are new to thermostats, with three wires, on wire is switched power for the furnace and the other is constant power for the thermostat to operate.

I bought the simplest Honeywell non programmable thermostat I could find and have been quite happy with it. I did not want to spend the money again on the nest. I had too many other things I needed for my new house. 68 degrees when we are home, 65 at night or if we are away working. If I forget to turn it down to 65, I don't worry too much about it.

In retrospect i should have just got another cheap thermostat from Canadian Tire to replace my wonky one. This one is working fine but it was a lot of expense with no real savings since i dont use the smart features one might use with a family coming and going. The real savings is in only heating the house when your home and awake. I keep it on the cool side of things and try to only heat the room im in. The nest and ecobee are just gimmicks imho.

I used to have one of the Honeywell programmable thermostats from ~20 years ago, and it was still the best I have seen or used. The UI was nothing special, but the feature set (eg ability to program blower-only periods to mix the air without having the blower running all the time, PROPER support for 2-stage furnace) was exceptional. It used more wires between thermostat & furnace in order to communicate things like low/high heat & blower control.

The main thing I liked about it was that it learned response times & profiles for your house and used that information to properly manage the low/high heat options on a 2-stage furnace. Most houses show a temperature drop at first when the heat comes on as cold air from the periphery gets mixed with the warmer air near the center, and modern thermostats seem to interpret that as "hey it's getting colder I must need to switch the furnace to loud immediately".

These days I have a Bryant Evolution thermostat that apparently uses some kind of serial data link between furnace and thermostat. Seems to work well** but I miss the features of the Honeywell, and I seem to be stuck with timer-based 2-stage operation which can be pretty annoying (furnace switches to high with a mighty roar 30 seconds before thermostat decides that temperature has reached the set point and shuts it off) - the only real solution I found was to set the timer for long enough that high heat was never used except for the occasional bitterly cold day when low heat was not able to keep up.

The problem is that it's really hard to get a straight answer on feature set with modern thermostats - lots of info on how colourful the GUI is, lots of info on how the thermostat will revolutionize your lifestyle, but hardly anything on what it actually does

** actually it doesn't work all that well - furnace shuts down occasionally with a "configuration" error code, apparently caused by a firmware mismatch between thermostat and furnace boards... I'm going to get one or both ends updated next time the furnace guy comes around and see if that helps - it's not good if your furnace shuts down randomly in the middle of winter when you are away for a few days

I am into simplifying my life nowadays. I yanked the thermo off the wall and installed a single pole single throw switch. When it's cold, I switch it on. When it's hot, I switch it off.

I suppose due to my lowly income status and the kinds of houses i own or rent the furnaces have always been a simple 2 wire affair. I used some modern wizardry to get this stat to work since it needs power from the furnace. I am hoping that when i upgrade this furnace i can use the full potential of the thermostat as bridgeman mentioned. I would like the idea of being able to cycle the fan since from March on i get a lot of sun in through my large south facing window and it keeps the house warm mostly but it keeps the furnace off and the temp upstairs around 20 to 21 degrees. For now i have to put in a replacement tooth so thats 5g's slated for the furnace i dont have this year.

LOL !

I have thought about doing that more than once... but on the really cold nights it would be too much like living in a cabin and having to get up every couple of hours to refill the wood stove.

Even with a standard furnace it's worth running at least one more wire so you can control the blower from the thermostat. It's possible that modern thermostats no longer have the "fan" switch but I have never seen one without it.

Or you could use Mojo's SPST switch for the fan