From: "Brad Bishop" 
Newsgroups: misc.consumers.house
Subject: Re: Pissed off at th thermostat
Date: Wed, 24 Dec 2003 10:08:42 -0500

"shinypenny"  wrote in message
news:c8cb5319.0312231955.71176a9@posting.google.com...
> John Davies  wrote in message
news:...
> > On 23 Dec 2003 16:33:15 GMT, Ignoramus28269
> >  wrote:
> >
> > >Recently, one day before we had to go on vacation, our house
> > >thermostat quietly stopped telling the furnace to turn on and quietly
> > >displayed a LOW BATTERY warning. We noticed it because it started
> > >getting cold. A change of battery took care of it.
> > >
>
> Ack! Igor, what brand thermostat do you have? Now you've got me
> running to read the manual for mine..... something I've been putting
> off (intended to program it but keep procrastinating, because the
> manual is so poorly written).

I looked into replacing the regular thermostats in my house with the fancy
electronic kind to do all of the temperature regulation throughout the day
with the hopes/thoughts of saving money on my electric/gas bills. After
researching it, I gave up. The reasons:

The basic thermostat in your house is a fairly simple mechanical device.
There are really just a few switches inside it with one of them being a
mercury switch mounted on the end of a coiled up piece of metal (the metal
expands/contracts and changes the angle at which the mercury bulb is sitting
thus turning the heat or A/C on and off). These things last for decades.
They are both simple and reliable.

The computer-driven thermostats are neat because you can program them to
make it warm when you get up in the morning and then automatically operate
at a more efficient temperature (depending on the season) when everyone is
at school and work. It certainly makes sense (and cents). Outside of the
initial programming of it, it turns into a set it and forget it kind of
device.

What turned me away from them was the mentioning in various places of what
happens if/when they screw up. The extremes of what can happen are not good:

* If they fail to turn on in the winter, then your house gets very cold.
Perhaps so cold that pipes freeze.
* If they fail to turn on in the summer then you can have other appliances
(computers, for example) that really need to be cooler but are still running
while the A/C is off. Yes, you can have power outages but then *everything*
goes off.

The other thing is what happens if they fail to turn off or get confused
about what mode they are in:

* Your A/C (and compressor) will run until it is discovered.
* Your furnance will run until it's discovered.

Add in a confused computer-thermostate and you could be running your A/C in
the winter and your heater in the summer.

Toss in the fact that the batteries which power the computers will
eventually go dead and something bad is bound to happen.

The regular old mechanical thermostats don't use batteries and just rely on
the house current and it seems like a much better solution to me.

So, what I do is to adjust the thermostat when it needs to be adjusted. If I
know that no one will be in the house all day, I'll adjust it accordingly
and that way it isn't heating or cooling unneccessarily nor it is letting
the house get too hot or cold.

As far as the water goes in your house. If you are going away for a few
days, turn the water heater off and turn off the water to your house at the
street. That'll save you bursted pipes (due to freezing or other problems
like the hoses going into your washing machine, refrigerator, or dish
washer). I say to turn the water heater off because, even though there is
water in it, if, for whatever reason, water was to leak out of it you don't
want your water heater while the tank is empty (I suppose it's just me being
extra paranoid). The good thing, though, is that when you get back from your
trip, it's a great time to empty your water heater (which should be done
periodically to remove the sediment from the bottom of it). The water is
cool and won't hurt your yard and you're probably not really needing hot
water right when you get home from a trip. It'll make your water heater last
longer and, I believe, it'll be more efficient.

Merry Christmas!

Brad