okay my fellow YouTube friends today we're going to show you one mistake most
nest thermostat owners make so to show this to you we're gonna take the nest
off the wall and show you what's going on okay we got the nest thermostat off
the wall and what you can see is the backplate here but if you notice very
closely there is a gaping hole in there from where the wires come feeding if
they're fed from the attic coming this way or if they're fed from the bottom if
your house has a crawlspace it's coming this way so basically what's going on
here is your wall cavity is hollow and if you look at a picture that I'm gonna
provide very soon you'll see that the wall cavities have wires both for
electrical or for your thermostat in this case as well as plumbing that's
running through the top plate being the plate that's connected up here or the
bottom plate connected from the bottom
okay so what we're going to do is we're going to take this great stuff spray
foam insulation and what we're gonna do is seal that opening there the reason
why is that hole is connected to your crawl or not your crawl space but your
actual hollow wall cavity and if you live in a cold climate where you're
heating most of the year in the wintertime
winter months and you have a crawlspace underneath the home that cold air is
coming towards your hollow wall cavity through that orifice and into the back
of your thermostat your thermostat is picking that up as ambient temperature
and you don't want it to do that if you're in an area where you're most of
your days in the year are hot then that heat coming from your attic space which
is over 110 degrees sometimes can be coming through this opening through this
orifice and making the thermostat think that it's really hot in the house when
in reality might not so we're gonna see how we fix this with this foam okay so
one thing you're gonna want to do is if you have cotton balls or just regular
tissue paper or even newspaper is try to fill it in as much as you can just so
the spray foam when you spray it in there will be held so to speak by the by
the paper that you've put in there just to give us some consistency and then
what you want to do is put some clear tape like so and what I'll do is I'll
poke a little hole here with a pen or a pencil just enough so I can fit the
straw of the great stuff Spray insulation so once you do that you'll
prevent the phone from over spraying and you know making a mess around here so
just big enough so that this little straw will fit in there so as you can
see it doesn't have to be a big hole just a little slit if you want or making
the hole with a pen or a pencil will take care of that so we're gonna do that
now and start spraying okay so our straws in there we're going
start spraying here we go
we're basically filling up that wall cavity with spray foam just to insulate
the thermostat from any hot or cold air hitting the back of it so we're gonna
empty the can and tune back into the video okay so once the spray foam is
cured you can remove the tape or at least semi cured where it's not going to
expand anymore you can just remove the tape and once you're done with removing
the tape you may go ahead and put the thermostat back in there so what's gonna
happen now is this will stop any unconditioned air whether it's hot or
cold from coming into the back of that thermostat and the thermostat will not
pick it up as conditioned air so we'll put the thermostat back in and give some
final thoughts okay fellow youtubers so now that thermostats back on the wall
just some final thoughts here the reason or the one mistake most nest owners make
is that they install the nest thermostat and they completely have no idea of that
hole in the back that we showed you earlier so sealing that hole and
insulating it will give you adequate temperature readings in the house and
you'll be comfortable year-round thank you for watching have a nice wonderful
day