Thermostatic Adventure!

Today we finally installed the new programmable thermostat we bought a while ago. We even got a rebate for it from the gas company.

Here you'll see the snazzy old-school Honeywell. It was a bit of a challenge to remove it (Jake perhaps will update here) but with the help of someone else's blog, we figured it out. The next challenge was "which wire is which"?



To our great relief, we finally got it all hooked up. And no one was even slightly shocked!

Of course, the old thermostat was round; the new one is not. So you can see some of the quite charming wallpaper that lies underneath the pink paint here. It's sorta tan with both black and white trees on it (or at least that's what we could figure out from this patch).




Jake here. That old thermostat was a monument to simple design inside and out. Inside was just a mercury switch on a heat sensitive coil. No batteries or circuit boards. No bothersome labels telling you which wire was which.

After removing the old thermostat, we had a white wire and a black wire. The new thermostat has plugs labeled Rh, Rc, W, Y, G. The manual for the new thermostat told us what those plugs are for, but the manual for the old thermostat, being nonexistent, had nothing to say about the wires. In the end the winning combination was white to Rh and black to W, but I suspect that the reverse would have worked as well.