(upbeat music)
- Hey guys, what's happening?
I thought I just share this last call I was just on,
I thought it was kind of interesting.
So I get a call that,
I get calls all the time where people are, you know,
installing their own smart thermostat
because, you know, they wanna be able to look
at their thermostat on their smartphone.
They wanna be able to control their thermostat
from their smartphone which is great.
I do it, I have a Honeywell 9000 Wi-Fi thermostat
that I use and I love it.
We put them in on all of our installs.
They're very easy for us to install them
'cause we do it all the time, right?
But when homeowners do it,
it can be a little bit more challenging
because they may not know all of the low voltage wiring
wires that are actually needed for the job.
So when they open up the book and they see things
like take the C wire and the R wire
and the W wire and the Y wire and the G wire
and label them all with these pre-made stickers
and then stick them out, you know,
it can get confusing.
A lot of people end up getting caught up
in the part where the common wire comes into place.
So the R, the Y, the W and the G,
they end up getting that fine.
It's the C wire, that fifth wire that you're gonna need
for these smart thermostats.
And it doesn't matter what color or anything
that that other wire is.
Usually R is gonna be your red wire, right?
And Y is gonna be your yellow wire and so on.
So people end up just kinda doing that.
But when they get to see, they're like,
"What color is that?
"Cream?
(laughs)
"I don't have a cream wire!"
So what it is with the common wire, we use blue or black
or brown or orange, it doesn't matter.
Just as long as whatever color you wire,
you have hooked up at the thermostat for that position,
the C position, that same color wire
you want to have it hooked up at the control board
on the furnace because now 24 volts will be able to circle
between your, you know,
from your furnace to your thermostat.
Furnace, back to the furnace.
They now will be able to communicate.
So we get called out all the time
because people can't figure out how to put that,
they can do the C wire at the thermostat
but they don't know where the other side of the wire is.
That other side is at the furnace.
Inside the furnace, you know, there's two control panels,
there are two panels that you can open
to get into that furnace
and inside one of those panel you're gonna end up seeing
like a blower motor, big motor and probably a control board.
Or maybe just a control board,
like a rectangular control board
where all the wires are going into.
And there will be a little strip
with some Phillips head screw heads on there
and next to those screw heads,
you might see little wires going into them.
Probably the same red, yellow, white and green wires
that you saw down at the thermostat.
Now, whatever wire you chose for that C position,
like say you picked the black wire,
the extra black wire that came with the thermostat wires.
And just because only four,
you maybe only see four right now,
but if you strip that wire back a little bit,
you might see five, six, seven, eight wires,
there's some that even have 12 wires in there,
so it's pretty rare these days to see wire
that only has like four wire anymore.
If you do indeed only have four wires,
then, you know, you probably need to either just
run a new thermostat wire or they do have
like a kit, like a common
there's some sort of kit in the ecobee or the Nest
that you can purchase and then adapt to it
so that you don't have to do a C wire anymore, but...
You know, you might as well just,
I don't know, if you can, just run a new thermostat
from up in the attic downstairs,
just pull it through, hopefully.
Hopefully it's not stapled in the wall.
But to get back to completing the task
basically just making at the thermostat and the furnace
that your R and R, red and red, you know?
And your Ys.
Everything's hooked up from Y to Y on your thermostat,
then G to G on your thermostat.
G on the control board to G on your thermostat.
The W to W and then finally your C.
Your C is your common terminal at the furnace
so whatever color wire you put on there,
you wanna make sure you put to the C position
on the thermostat.
And it might say RC or RH,
just go ahead and put it in the RC position
and there will be a jumper between the RC and RH.
The majority of the time there is a jumper there
between RC and RH, even if you don't see it,
it's probably done underneath the little panel
'cause they try to make them look nice.
To go on further in this conversation,
so this is exactly the same thing that was happening here.
This guy was putting in ecobee thermostats and...
- [Navigation] Police reported ahead.
- Nice.
Waze, looking me up.
So this guy was trying to do an ecobee thermostat.
He was able to hook it up and do the C wire
on his first zone.
So he has two zones,
he has upstairs system, downstairs systems
and he has two actual air conditioning systems for that,
it's a pretty big house.
So he was able to figure out for the system downstairs
'cause it was not zoned.
This particular, the upstairs zone
had zoning hooked up to it.
And I'm forgetting which system it is,
but it's I don't know, kind of an outdated system.
Ugly thermostats, you know.
And then this zoning also had like other sensor thermostats
like in each room, like three rooms upstairs,
so each room upstairs had its own zone,
it's super cool at one point.
But this guy had to choose between this type of zoning
or the ecobee.
You know, do you want the zoning more
or do you want the ecobee, the cool feature
on your smartphone to be able to use your smartphone
with your thermostat?
And he's like, "I clearly wanna use just the...
"I would like to bypass the zoning,
"I just wanna be able to use the smartphone app."
I'm like, "Cool, so we'll do that."
So we ended up bypassing the zoning,
making sure the dampers stay open
and we went from the thermostat
directly into the furnace.
We basically just bypassed the zone board.
It's like 11-year-old system
and this guys just moved in this past year so they don't...
They weren't super keen on the zoning anyways,
they were saying that one zone would never open
or would never work or something.
So we wired up like we normally would have,
we would have got red, white, yellow, green
and then we went with black for common
just 'cause it was there.
And that's the same wire he used for the downstairs system,
I just wanted it to be uniform.
So we tried it, we plugged them in.
The thing also about this guy's thermostat wire
was that it was...
It was stranded, so it was like 18 gauge,
but it was stranded 18 gauge
and I'm not sure that those wires were meant to be plugged
into the little ports there on the ecobee base,
or the Nest base.
I was just talking to Keith about it
and he was saying that yeah, he had another one
with stranded wires in the center
trying to put this stranded wire into a little plug,
you're like, "Get in there."
(laughs)
So I don't know if it was having an issue with that,
but once we got the wires in,
then the power would come on, right?
So I'm like, "Oh shoot, what just happened?"
So got down, I checked the voltage at the R and black wire
and I'm only getting 17 volts.
I go up to the control board and I check R and C there
and I've got 27 volts, so I'm like, "Okay, well,
"I mean, the voltage is there, it's just not getting
"down through the wires or something."
So I just changed the wire.
It doesn't matter what color wire that is,
so I switched it to blue, so I ended up using blue
as my common wire at the furnace
and at the thermostat and I finally got powers.
I got 27 volts now, so good to go.
And we think we're done, we put the base on,
everything is running or everything is going through the...
The customer's going through his, you know,
the next steps, you know, like connecting his thermostat
and...
And it says that it's not recognizing the G wire.
I'm like, "Huh, shoot."
'Cause I know it's plugged in
but it's like that stranded wire
so getting it into the hole is kind of difficult.
So I just tried a different wire.
Tried the orange wire in place of the G.
And it still wasn't recognizing the G wire,
so I'm like, "Hm, that's very interesting."
Fortunately, there's a feature on the ecobee
as you're setting it up, as you're going through the setup,
there's a feature on there there lets you manually adjust
the connections within the thermostat.
So we basically just told it,
we were able to just hit a button on there,
so we were able to hit a button that says modify
and then we clicked that we want--
- [Navigation] In seven miles
exit to exit 49 Point View Drive.
- Then we ended up click on the G and that ended up
being a solution for us to not have a G wire so (laughs)
it's pretty interesting.
It's a nice feature to have.
But we finally got it up and running,
heating and cooling verified before I left,
so got him up and running,
but I thought it was an interesting call.
We get a lot of these calls all year around basically
because the smart thermostats are so popular
that everybody wants them.
So we basically just charge people basically 100 bucks
for the call to come out there and basically hook up
the common fire at the furnace.
A lot of times it ends up being just that
but, you know, we have a $75 service call
and then I ended up charging like 25 bucks
to go hook up the common wire, whatever,
but it starts a great relationship for the future with us.
If we can get in there and not gauge them to death
with repair cost for something like that
when they're just trying to be hip and cool,
you know what I'm saying?
So I'm down, I'm hip with the smart thermostats
and I just kinda thought I would share that with you guys,
always interesting out in the field.
All right, guys.
Well, thank you so much for watching,
I appreciate it as always.
I hope some of the DIYers at home find this useful.
I also hope that some of the newer technicians out there
will be able to check this out, as well.
It's very common call here in California right now
with everybody getting the smart thermostats
and stuff like that.
Yeah, once again, thanks so much for watching, guys,
I appreciate it.
Fox Family Heating and Air Conditioning
here in Sacramento, California.
We would love to take care of you guys,
anytime your heating and air conditioning is down,
please give us a call
and thanks so much for watching.
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