Fun with HVAC

[tobefirst]

My house is about 13 years old. It has what I guess would be a standard HVAC system for the midwest. When my wife and I moved in almost 7 years ago, we installed the Nest Thermostat (either the first generation or perhaps one of the first second generation ones) we had been using in the studio we were previously in.

Lately, we've been noticing an issue. Despite the thermostat saying that the house is at, say, 67° and the heat is set to 70°, the furnace will not be on. I can remedy this by adjusting the thermostat to below the ambient temperature for a handful of seconds, and then turning it back up to where I'd like it to be. A couple seconds later, the furnace activates and hot air comes out of the vents.

Does anyone have a guess as to whether this is a furnace issue – it is starting to get old – or a thermostat issue? I tend to lean toward the latter, but I'm not an expert by any means. I'd just like to get an idea as to whether this seems obvious to anyone before calling in a service person. If it is the thermostat, I am happy to replace that myself.

Any thoughts?

 

[Cmaier]

My house is about 13 years old. It has what I guess would be a standard HVAC system for the midwest. When my wife and I moved in almost 7 years ago, we installed the Nest Thermostat (either the first generation or perhaps one of the first second generation ones) we had been using in the studio we were previously in.

Lately, we've been noticing an issue. Despite the thermostat saying that the house is at, say, 67° and the heat is set to 70°, the furnace will not be on. I can remedy this by adjusting the thermostat to below the ambient temperature for a handful of seconds, and then turning it back up to where I'd like it to be. A couple seconds later, the furnace activates and hot air comes out of the vents.

Does anyone have a guess as to whether this is a furnace issue – it is starting to get old – or a thermostat issue? I tend to lean toward the latter, but I'm not an expert by any means. I'd just like to get an idea as to whether this seems obvious to anyone before calling in a service person. If it is the thermostat, I am happy to replace that myself.

Any thoughts?

I had something similar and it was a thermostat issue. I had two nests (separate hvac upstairs and down), and confirmed the issue was the Nest by swapping the thermostats.

I ended up replacing with Ecobees. (These are in some ways not as good as Nest and in other ways better)

 

[tobefirst]

(These are in some ways not as good as Nest and in other ways better)

Tell me more. I'm inclined to move away from Nest, but would love to hear about your experience.

 

[Cmaier]

Tell me more. I'm inclined to move away from Nest, but would love to hear about your experience.

Ecobee has some quirks. You set up “comfort settings” and name them. So you might have “wake-up” and set the temperatures for that setting, and “go to work” and set the temperatures for that. Then you set a schedule each day, assigning comfort settings to different times. You can only schedule on half-hour increments, which is kind of a pain - we’d like to set wake up to 5:15, but end up having to set it to 5:00, which means the hot air blowing out of the vent wakes up my wife.

So there’s a somewhat annoying level of indirection. It also has something like Nest’s ability to figure out its own schedule, but I found it to be doing a bad job - we were always too cold or too hot. Another quirk is that if you turn the fan on manually, it ignores the schedule for temperature.

Final annoyance is, say it’s 9:10 and you feel way too hot. So you turn down the temperature. It ignores you if, for example, there is something scheduled to occur at 9:30.

The nice things are you can say “hey Siri, it’s too hot” and it will turn down your thermostat. Homekit support is also good.

 

[tobefirst]

Thanks, @Cmaier. I may have to do some research (Hello, Wirecutter) and find one somewhere with a generous return policy to see if it fixes our issues and is something we can live with. Homekit support is a plus, but Alexa support is a requirement. I know that Ecobees play along there, so it could be a good fit. I'll also have to check to see what rebates the utility is giving out at the moment.

Anyone else have thoughts on if this is a furnace or thermostat issue?

 

[fooferdoggie]

it sounds like a thermostat thing. I could not get ecobe to turn on and off as we left and arrived. we do it with homekit. bu we have to say goodbye to get it to work when we leave. been years sicne we had the nest. it worked well with smartthings though.