Beguiled

The crows above the forest call;
Tomorrow they may form and go.
O hushed October morning mild,
Begin the hours of this day slow.
Make the day seem to us less brief.
Hearts not averse to being beguiled,
Beguile us in the way you know.
— Robert Frost, “October”

I scratched an itch and started looking at solar power again. I love the idea of it, but the economics don’t really work for us. The money we’d invest in a full system for our house (and yes, I’ve got the six-figure estimates) wouldn’t see a payback in enough time to be worthwhile. We could invest a fraction of that in increasing efficiencies around the house and probably see better return.

To that end, I figured I’d start with low hanging fruit and replace our older programmable thermostats with some newer, WiFi-capable smarter ones. Since I do not want any sort of subscription element or cloud-dependency, our choices came down to Ecobees or one of the Honeywells. I opted for the Ecobee Essential. Smart enough to do the job, simple enough for my needs, and priced about right.

“Installs easily,” said the reviews. I popped off the old thermostat, noted which colored wires went to which terminal and made the switch. Nothing. I re-checked the breaker; it was on. I called Ecobee’s support and a very helpful, very polite man in Toronto walked me through some troubleshooting and we determined that while I had thrown the breaker for the compressor outside, I had forgotten to throw the breaker for the air-handler in the attic. At some point some wires had touched and I blew a fuse. Off to the hardware store to pick up some 5A fuses.

I put it all back together and lo, it powered up. I configured everything and then tried to lower the temperature. Nothing. This time I contacted support via live-chat. Another helpful specialist walked me through several more tests and in the end we determined that the unit was probably a dud.

Well, I told him, I have a second unit on-hand which I had purchased for the upstairs system. We both agreed that the likelihood of two bum units was pretty low so I prepared everything to try the second unit, which also powered up but likewise didn’t seem to actually do anything. Couldn’t turn on the fan. Couldn’t start the AC or heater. Time for a third call, and yet another helpful person walked me through an exhaustive set of tests whereby we determined that something is squirrel inside the air-handler. The old thermostat works fine. The new one doesn’t, though both are wired identically and correctly. She suggested I call an HVAC tech so I reached out to the folks who installed this system a couple of years ago. Everything else, as far as we could tell, was configured and wired exactly as it needed to be. The system, for its part, could be manually started by touching various wires together, so we know that part is good too. It’s a puzzle for sure.

While I wait for a call-back, I uploaded installation manuals for the handler, compressor, and heating system to Claude and started asking questions. There was lots of back and forth, and it seems that the likeliest explanation is a field-modification of some kind to the standard wiring. This triggered a hazy memory; my wife recalled that something ‘had to be done’ in order to enable an auto-hold function on the old thermostat. You can set a temperature and the system will either heat or cool to hold it there. We sort of liked this at first but eventually stopped using it - I don’t need the heat coming on as often as it wanted to. One early theory of Claude’s was that the solid-state switching in the Ecobee wasn’t sending enough juice to kick the blower on, but it’s more likely that there’s just an oddity in the wiring inside the handler.

Our system is fairly run-of-the-mill: a common make and model of air-handler (Trane) and a pretty straightforward heat-pump (American Standard, which is basically Trane). It was recently installed without any customization or weird mods. I’d expect to see widespread reports of incompatibility but haven’t been able to find any. Most everyone, as far as I can tell, finds a way to make these things work so I’m confident we will too.

I will certainly keep this multi-day project in mind the next time I see “installs easily,” though. I spent yesterday afternoon furiously restoring everything to status quo ante so that my wife would not come home to me having to explain why the air wasn’t working. The old thermostat went back on quickly enough and everything just works again.

Some rain expected this weekend. Next weekend our second son is getting married so the intervening days will be getting gradually more chaotic. This will be the last of the big events around here this year until the holidays roll around. It’s been a long time in coming. Hard to believe it’s almost here. His fiancee has already moved into their new apartment and he’s been schlepping his stuff over a load at a time. Most of it’s gone. Soon he will be too and we’ll be down to three kids at home: two in high-school, one in middle-school. The two older kids are in the rowing club and head to the lake after school so we don’t see them most weeknights until around 7:00.

We wrapped up Silo Season 3. Very excited for the conclusion next summer. On-deck: the latest Slow Horses and probably some other stuff I can’t recall at the moment. Nothing new bookwise.