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scross
join:2002-09-13
USA

scross to Jack_in_VA

Member

to Jack_in_VA

Re: Looking for a new thermostat

said by Jack_in_VA:

I keep the house temperature 75, 24/7 in summer and 72, 24/7 in winter. I don't care if the Fridge knocks off and the food spoils. The grocery store has plenty more and it's insured anyhow. No need to monitor the doors as we have very little to no crime. If the house burns down it's insured. So bottom line not much is important except my wife's and my health and happiness. Life is now good.

75? My wife would kill me! 68 is her preferred summer setting (a temp that, amazingly, is "too cold" for her in the winter time), and 72 is the "hot", peak-rate setting right now. (Unfortunately, when your wife insists that 68 is just right, and once you get acclimated to that, after a short while 72 does in fact seem hot in comparison.)

Now, I'm going to let you in on a little secret, so you'll have to promise to just keep this between me and you, OK? Once I get that 3M50 installed, and once I've convinced her not to touch it, and once I've convinced her that it has "a mind of its own", I plan to set things up so that the 68 degree setting slowly increases over time (a matter of weeks or months), until she gets acclimated to something much more reasonable - at least 70 degrees, hopefully more like 72! And if that's successful, I may even consider going higher.

Nick_L
Premium Member
join:2003-01-22
Pittsburgh, PA

Nick_L

Premium Member

Ah yes, the foundation of any good relationship, lying and deceit. Lucky lady.

Sly
Premium Member
join:2004-02-20
Tennessee

Sly to scross

Premium Member

to scross
Your humidity is screwed up. You need 68 in the summer because your AC is oversized and is not able to bring down the humidity. Therefore it seems warmer. In the winter your house is dry and so it feels colder. Therefore you have to set it hotter. Get a humidifier in the winter and either slow the fan speed down or put in some more restrictive air filters in the summer to bring the humidity down. Then you should be able to set it at almost the same temperature summer to winter with little difference in feel.

Jack_in_VA
Premium Member
join:2007-11-26
North, VA

Jack_in_VA to scross

Premium Member

to scross
said by scross:

said by Jack_in_VA:

I keep the house temperature 75, 24/7 in summer and 72, 24/7 in winter. I don't care if the Fridge knocks off and the food spoils. The grocery store has plenty more and it's insured anyhow. No need to monitor the doors as we have very little to no crime. If the house burns down it's insured. So bottom line not much is important except my wife's and my health and happiness. Life is now good.

75? My wife would kill me! 68 is her preferred summer setting (a temp that, amazingly, is "too cold" for her in the winter time), and 72 is the "hot", peak-rate setting right now. (Unfortunately, when your wife insists that 68 is just right, and once you get acclimated to that, after a short while 72 does in fact seem hot in comparison.)

Now, I'm going to let you in on a little secret, so you'll have to promise to just keep this between me and you, OK? Once I get that 3M50 installed, and once I've convinced her not to touch it, and once I've convinced her that it has "a mind of its own", I plan to set things up so that the 68 degree setting slowly increases over time (a matter of weeks or months), until she gets acclimated to something much more reasonable - at least 70 degrees, hopefully more like 72! And if that's successful, I may even consider going higher.

Any relationship is one of equal standing and compromise. 75 summer, 72 winter. Both of us can live with that with no problem or feeling of being forced to accept it.

In summer with the unit taking out so much humidity 75 can feel very cold at times.
scross
join:2002-09-13
USA

scross to Sly

Member

to Sly
said by Sly:

Your humidity is screwed up. You need 68 in the summer because your AC is oversized and is not able to bring down the humidity. Therefore it seems warmer. In the winter your house is dry and so it feels colder. Therefore you have to set it hotter. Get a humidifier in the winter and either slow the fan speed down or put in some more restrictive air filters in the summer to bring the humidity down. Then you should be able to set it at almost the same temperature summer to winter with little difference in feel.

It is, at this very moment, 68 degrees with 46% humidity; this rarely goes much above 50% unless maybe someone has just taken a shower (I try to get them to use the bathroom fans but they don't always listen). The guys who replaced our unit last month were worried that 4 tons might be too small, based on size of the house, but I told them that's what we've had for the past 30 years and it cooled just fine. And we do generally use humidifiers in the winter, but with the milder winters we've been having lately we've kind of gotten out of the habit.

There are a few things I know I need to do, though, in order to make temperatures more consistent throughout the house. As it stands right now, there may be a very noticeable difference in temp from room to room, and even from one end of a large room to another:

1. Re-tune all the vents and dampers (some of these are new, with the new AC)
2. Fix some known insulation problems in the attic and upstairs bedrooms
3. Add/update some window treatments to stop the sun from heating the windows up so much
4. I replaced the control board in the air handler last year, and the new board has a couple of options for creative fan control (continuous slow speed when the compressor isn't running, for example), so I may have to experiment with that. Unfortunately, this is enabled by cutting wires (no jumpers, no switches), so I haven't rushed to do it yet, and I may decide to pull out my soldering iron and re-engineer the board a bit before I do.
scross

1 edit

scross to Nick_L

Member

to Nick_L
said by Nick_L:

Ah yes, the foundation of any good relationship, lying and deceit. Lucky lady.

Hey, whatever works - we've been together for 25 years and counting.

DON'T JUDGE ME!



And BTW, she told me this morning that she tweaked the "don't touch" thermostat when she got up, because she was "hot" (it was 70 degrees in the house at the time she did this). So now all hope is lost!

Sly
Premium Member
join:2004-02-20
Tennessee

Sly to scross

Premium Member

to scross
It sounds like your system is running properly if you are maintaining around 46% humidity. One thing about balancing the vents... do you have any rooms that you keep the doors closed to? The reason I say is that I have a room the cats live in upstairs and so I have to keep the door closed. To make up for the loss in airflow due to the door being shut, I measured the surface area of the vents in the room and then I cut the door at the bottom to raise it a little off the floor so that the same airflow can go through the room regardless of whether the door is open or closed.

Maybe you sleep with the bedroom door shut. If so then that room will get hotter at night and you might need to open it up or allow some airflow through the door to keep it cool at night... This may not reflect your situation at all, just saying...

Now I don't mean this in a negative way at all, but could there be something wrong with your wife physically? 68 in the house and low humidity would freeze most people. Has she always been like this or is her being hot all the time a new development? If you've been together for 25 years then she may be due for menopause and will be hot no matter how cool you get it. We keep our house at 77 in the summer and sometimes turn it down to 76 if we get a little warm.

Back to the thermostat, my Honeywell 8000 can be set to lockout the temperature or to narrow the range that it can be adjusted. You have to go into a programming mode and then you can limit the range of adjustment to wherever you like or you can lock it out all together so that the temp can not be changed.

If she is hot all the time then you might consider ceiling fans or letting the AC fan run either on "on" or "circulate". Maybe a little moving air might be enough to convince her to leave the thermostat alone. A little wind chill goes a long way.

Nick_L
Premium Member
join:2003-01-22
Pittsburgh, PA

Nick_L to scross

Premium Member

to scross
said by scross:

said by Nick_L:

Ah yes, the foundation of any good relationship, lying and deceit. Lucky lady.

Hey, whatever works - we've been together for 25 years and counting.

DON'T JUDGE ME!



Don't judge you? You haven't been around the internet much, have you? The internet is nothing if not a place to judge people you don't know!

On the other hand, who am I to judge success!! Happy 25th. Cheers!
scross
join:2002-09-13
USA

scross to Sly

Member

to Sly
All doors to important rooms generally stay open, with ceiling fans in almost every room which run constantly (at slow/medium speed) during the summer. My wife also keeps a separate small fan on her constantly, blowing at high speed.

She claims she's "always been hot-natured". I'm not allowed to mention menopause or other physical issues; however, I have frequently suggested that she just wear fewer clothes. The same woman who claims that she's "always hot" will also (when she sleeps) cover herself with not one but two blankets, but I'm not allowed to point out this fact. Nor am I allowed to react negatively when she wakes up, throws off those blankets, and screams "It is SOOOOOO hot in here!"

The real problem, as I see it, is two-fold:

1. The thermostat is in the dead-center of the house. The east side of the house is well-shaded and stays comfortable. The west side is no longer as well-shaded due to tree loss by the neighbors (storm damage and preemptive cutting on their part), so it gets full sun in the afternoons and heats up. My living room - which spans east side to west side - has a noticeably different temp at either end, even though it has two separate ceiling fans and two separate supply vents (east/west). It is easy enough to trace this heat back to the windows on the west side, which also cause issues in the dining room and kitchen (both on the west side), although not really for the laundry room and the back bathroom (both on the west side, but partially shaded). So the windows here are the real key. Tweaking my new control board for continuous fan usage might help a lot, too.

2. The second problem (and one that is starting to affect me, too) is that I've let my wife get away with this for so long now that she thinks of 68 degrees as normal, and anything much above that as hot. This is totally my fault, and something that I'm trying to rectify now, through various nefarious means. But there's probably no way that either of us would stay very comfortable at 75 degrees or above, unless maybe we both had a fan blowing right on us (I can be comfortable with temps up to at least the mid-80s with this). I have no real problem with doing this as long as you're consistently sitting in one spot, but the trouble with it is that as soon as you walk away from the fan, you feel hot.

I know that I have some issues related to the insulation in the attic, too, but that's more of an upstairs (spare bedroom/office) problem than a downstairs (living space) problem.

As far as the thermostat goes, my new Honeywell 4000 isn't very adjustable, as far as I can tell. Or if it is then that info is carefully hidden away somewhere. I've never really intended to keep it, anyway, and I would have had the AC guys go ahead and install the 3M50 when they put in the new AC (which they offered to do), but then they seemed so intimidated by it that I let them put in their standard Honeywell instead. They did this remarkably quickly at the end of the day, while the 3M50 would have probably taken considerably more time (theirs and mine) to get installed and up and running, and I had already promised my wife that she would be coming home to a nice cool house shortly, which she did.

Jack_in_VA
Premium Member
join:2007-11-26
North, VA

Jack_in_VA

Premium Member

If a thermostat keeps the temperature at the set point you set how is any other brand or model do anything else?
scross
join:2002-09-13
USA

scross

Member

said by Jack_in_VA:

If a thermostat keeps the temperature at the set point you set how is any other brand or model do anything else?

I don't understand your question.

Jack_in_VA
Premium Member
join:2007-11-26
North, VA

Jack_in_VA

Premium Member

said by scross:

said by Jack_in_VA:

If a thermostat keeps the temperature at the set point you set how is any other brand or model do anything else?

I don't understand your question.

Are you saying that your present thermostat doesn't maintain a steady set-point? If it is how is any other going to give you any different results?
scross
join:2002-09-13
USA

scross

Member

said by Jack_in_VA:

said by scross:

said by Jack_in_VA:

If a thermostat keeps the temperature at the set point you set how is any other brand or model do anything else?

I don't understand your question.

Are you saying that your present thermostat doesn't maintain a steady set-point? If it is how is any other going to give you any different results?

To clarify: Most of us (at least the older ones among us) are used to reading an analog thermometer of some type; when I think of a comfortable room temperature of 72 degrees, I'm thinking of 72 degrees on an old-fashioned, red-alcohol thermometer (I actually have one of these on my living room wall). Digital thermometers (even well-calibrated ones) tend to show a different temperature than analog ones, and this can easily vary by at least a couple of degrees, in my experience. Keep in mind, too, that my thermostat is in the center of the house, and a thermometer which reads 72 there might read 68 or lower in the well-shaded part of the house, or 74 or higher in the unshaded part.

Most digital thermostats have a setting "window" of around one degree, on average - maybe half-a-degree for newer ones, maybe two degrees for older ones. My old one from 25 years ago was two degrees, meaning that when set for 72 cooling it might kick on at 74 and kick back off at 70, and do the reverse of that in heating mode. And it sounds like the Honeywell units may have some other interesting operational characteristics, too.

Now, from a practical standpoint, when in heating mode my old digital thermostat might be set to 72, but it might not kick off until it reached 74 by its digital thermometer, which might read more like 76 by my analog thermometer, which is too damned hot! The natural temperature differences between rooms could make this even worse. And this really bothered me from a comfort standpoint, but there was absolutely nothing I do about it (I couldn't change it, nor could I recalibrate it). If I set the temperature back down to 70 or even 68 in order to compensate, then my wife might complain that it was too cold in the house and set it back up. (Note my earlier comment about her thinking that 68 is just right for summer but too cold for winter.) So it was no great loss for me to rip that digital thermostat off the wall at 3 AM in a fit of anger and frustration, and to put back my mercury thermostat, which was capable of being re-calibrated and tweaked in various ways, and served me happily for 25 years. It remains to be seen how well my new Honeywell (or the 3M50 which will soon replace it) behaves over the long term.