January 5, 2017: A New Thermostat

Thursday.  I put in a normal day. Dominica worked like crazy all day going through the boxes in the garage to get ready for the final packing.  The Ralstons are getting to the house on Saturday night and we expect to overlap with them for just a little bit this weekend.  We want everything all cleaned up.  Shawn came over too, since the garage was now clear, and he was able to get the rest of his stuff that has been being stored at the house.  So we suddenly have tons of space that we did not have before.

Our real adventure for the day did not occur until this evening.  It got very cold tonight and we noticed that heat have issues, again.  I ran outside and checked before it froze out and found the heat pump encased in ice.  We tried working with the thermostat again but were unable to get the stupid 3M device to not run the heat pump.

My theory is that the 3M thermostat has not worked for years and no one has been paying attention to how much it has been running or how the house does not heat up properly.  I have not been here for a winter since the winter of 2012 – 2013.

So after trying to get it working for a while I spoke to Art and we all agreed that it seemed like the thermostat was the issue.  We have hated that thermostat since the first day with it.  Absolute garbage, I will never buy 3M products after that.  I checked the website and it looks like they sold the product line and maybe the company that they sold it to is out of business now as well.

I checked online and found that our local Home Depot carried the EcoBee 3 Lite that I want to get to replace our thermostat.  They had three listed as being in the Carrollton store so I immediately ran down there and picked one up.  It was the very last one on the shelf!

I came home and Dominica and I managed to follow the directions and replace the old thermostat with the new Ecobee and instantly the furnace kicked on and started heating the house.  The smell of burning dust from the furnace made it very, very apparent that the furnace has not kicked on in a very long time.  The house heated up like it has not done in a very long time.  We are so thankful that we figured this out.  Sadly we now have an amazing, new top of the line thermostat with really cool features just in time for us to leave the house for a very long time.

So that was some excitement, but it turned out really well and it was an upgrade that we have been meaning to do for a very long time.  So we are not too upset about it.  It was just bad timing.