Saturday, January 05, 2013

Replaced Rear Bedroom Thermostat

The motorhome has two propane forced-air heaters. The main and larger one has registers on the floor running the length of the motorhome and heats both the bedroom and lounge.

The smaller heater just serves the bedroom and to a lesser degree, the bathroom. It works great but the thermostat is hard to set accurately and has a wide temperature  range where it gets too hot and then too cool.  We like to sleep with the bedroom window open, so the thermostat couldn’t be turn on at bedtime or the furnace would run all night. This meant I had to hop out of bed to turn it on in the morning. I know!

So I replaced the original mechanical thermostat with an electronic one.

Now it stays very close to the easily set temperature. As a bonus it can also be set to turn on and off at desired times. No more popping out of bed to turn on the heater in the mornings.

Installation was a bit of a puzzle. The mechanical the thermostat only used two wires. The electronic one’s installation manual gave directions for connecting, using four to seven wires.  In an internet search I didn’t find a two wire example, only a three wire solution. Using the best guess method, I connected the two wires I had to two of the new thermostat’s wires and it works perfectly.  With only two wires there is no power but the thermostat has a battery for backup and it seem to work ok on battery power. We’ll see how long battery last.

OldTherm                     NewTherm

Old on the left and new on the right.

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About Us

The Normans are Debbie, Jim and Ty the cat. The Horizon is our Itasca Horizon Motorhome. We spend the summers in cool northern Washington and travel through the warm south during the winter. We spend time in the spring and fall at our home in northern California as we pass by by.

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