I wrote a couple of weeks ago about the home automation gear I’ve been installing in my house,  specifically mentioning the Venstar T1700 thermostat I bought.  At the time I initially tried to simply replace my existing thermostat with the Venstar, but found I was lacking a very important piece – the common wire.   Not to let something like that keep me down,  I decided on a new course of action.

The old thermostat line was a 7 conductor,  only four of which were being used.  As I mentioned in that post a few weeks ago,  It appeared as though the line actually was two lines spliced together somewhere in the middle.   None of the extra three wires went all the way through, so it was essentially useless to me for using the Venstar.

I decided then to do what any self respecting DIY’er would do – I went to Home Depot and bought 50 feet of 5 conductor thermostat wire,  some wire moulding and wire staples,  a Black ‘N Decker drill (with drill bits) and crafted a plan of attack.

The Furnace is in my garage,    and the main great room of the house – easily the central location of the house – is down a short hallway from the garage.   In between the two (and taking up one wall of that hallway) is the closet where my washer and dryer are.   Perfect.   Plan crafted.

I ran the line from the furnace,    around the garage on the wall,   through the wall into the aforementioned closet,    across the top of the closet (above the door so you never even see it),  down the wall next to the door, THROUGH that wall and into the back of the thermostat mounted on the other side (inside the great room).   The total length of the run ended up being just about 40 feet give or take a couple of feet.   I did the drilling,   ran the line and then hooked it up on both ends ( Green wire to the G terminal, Yellow wire to the Y terminal, White wire to the W terminal, Red wire to the Red terminal and Blue wire to the Common terminal) and restored power to the unit.   A quick look at the thermostat confirmed that THIS time it actually powered up.

Next was time to test the unit out.   I put it in HEAT mode and put the set point about 10 degrees above room temperature.    Sure enough,  without delay the furnace started up.    I then tested the A/C – Put it in cool mode and put the set point about 10 degrees below room temperature.     The furnace turned off and the AC unit turned on.   Cool air started flowing – very nice.

Then I set the set point to AT room temperature,   and turned the fan on,     that worked too.

Awesome,  it all worked and worked beautifully.

The last piece of the picture was the Insteon module which would let me use my home control server to automate setting the temperatures.

That turned out to be pretty simple – you just plug it in.    Adding it to the server was no different than any of the other Insteon equipment I’ve used,  and is standard to how you add things in Indigo ( I won’t go into that here).  Sure enough, once I added it Indigo saw the current settings on the thermostat and allowed me to remotely modify them.

Late last week I got Prism Reflector working, which lets me see my Indigo control pages from anywhere on the ‘net.     This allows me a great amount of flexibility with controlling my home even when I’m on the go.

Popularity: 21% [?]

Related Posts

• Building an automated home is sometimes harder than it *should* be
• File this under: Would be nice
• Security System: Surprise number 1
• When a Smart Home becomes a Dumb Home.