This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3,880 for Friday the 16th of June 2023.
Today's show is entitled, Installing a Google Nest Thermostat.
It is hosted by Ahu Kahn and is about 13 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is I installed a new Smart Thermostat.
Hello!
This is Ahu Kahn, welcoming you to another exciting episode of Hacker Public Radio and I'm
going to talk about a little technical problem I dealt with recently and it has to
do with a thermostat.
We had an old thermostat, I won't say it was that old, but it had started misbehaving.
It had up and down buttons that should have let you change the temperature setting, except
that they suddenly stopped working.
And when it's cold outside and you can't raise the temperature inside, it does kind
of suck.
So it was clearly time for a change.
I decided that for my purposes a Google Nest Thermostat was the best option.
There are two options here.
I mean there are two kinds of Google Nest thermostats.
There's a more expensive learning thermostat that says it learns your patterns and automatically
adjusts your settings as it learns them.
And then a simpler model at about half the price that you control via your smartphone.
So I didn't see that paying twice as much money bought me all that much.
So I went for the simpler, less expensive model.
It does everything I wanted to do.
I can enter settings manually on my smartphone, which is fine.
And also I can remotely control the temperature on my smartphone since it is connected
to my home Wi-Fi network.
Now, that's handy because I can change the temperature when we're traveling to save energy.
I just know need to heat the house to human comfort temperature when there's no humans there.
And then when the plane lands at the airport, I can log in and set the temperature so it
is comfortable when we walk in the door.
Very handy that.
Now, if you want to know a little more about this thermostat, there is a consumer
reports review, there's a link in the show notes, you can read that and get an idea.
You could also, you could order this from Google and have it shipped to you, but I actually
found it at my local lows for the same price Google would charge, so I picked it up immediately.
Next I checked out a video on how to do the install and found one on YouTube, again, a link
in the show notes.
It's technically, I had watched several videos before hand to convince myself that this
was within my capabilities, but then, you know, before actually starting to do the install,
I reviewed them again.
It looked fairly easy, so first I went to the distribution panel and turned off the
circuit breaker for the furnace.
Now, as it happened, the furnace was running at that moment, so I immediately heard it
turn off, which was a nice confirmation that I had, in fact, cut the power.
Next I removed the cover plate on the old thermostat.
It was just a plastic plate that snapped on and I got it off easily.
The next step they recommend is to take a picture of the wires as they exist.
Now, I had seemed sensible, so I took the photo.
It was a bit dark in the hallway, so I used my flash for that.
Then I opened up the box for the new Google Nest thermostat and found that unlike the
video, it did not come with a screwdriver and cover plate for the wall, but that was not
a biggie for me.
I can fix the wall, I have more screwdrivers than I really need, I suspect, including all
of the mini drivers for electronics.
What was in the box importantly was the labels to put on the wires.
They should be color-coded, but you really don't want to somehow get your wires mixed up.
Since this was a dark area, I pulled over a floor lamp to provide strong illumination.
The wires in the thermostat were connected to screw connections that were labeled with labels
like Y1G and so on.
What you want to do is disconnect one wire at a time and put the appropriate label on
it so you can later connect it correctly to the new Google Nest thermostat.
The wire should be color-coded anyway, but you need to watch out for Y and Y2 or W and
W2, and in my system, the Y2 was blue and the W2 was orange.
So it's a good idea to label them even if it is a finicky job.
If all of my wires labeled, it was time to remove the old unit.
It was held in by two screws, one on each side, which in turn were held in the drywall
by two wall anchors.
I pulled the anchors and screws out and set them aside and ended up using them later.
With the screws removed, all I had to do was push the wires back through the hole in
the middle of the unit and now I had an ugly hole in my wall with wires coming out.
Progress there.
I didn't get the Nest unit and instead of screws on each side, it is held on by screws
top and bottom.
Now the Nest unit comes with two long, self-tapping screws, but I did not feel like
that gave me a good solid connection to the drywall.
If I was able to mount this on top of something more substantial, those screws might be
good, but in this case I decided that the screws in the wall anchors, I set aside from
the old one, was a much better option.
You put in the top screw first and used the built-in level to level the unit and it has
a little bubble level built into it.
You mark the bottom screw and then attach it.
Now the next step for me was the wires that all been attached to screw terminals in the
old unit, so they had hooks formed on the end.
Google Nest uses push-in connections, so I had to straighten out all of the ends, pliers
to care that part.
Then to make the connections, on Google Nest there are push-in terminals on the left
and right, and they are labeled similarly to the wires, and you know, the labeling is
all based on colors, really, y is yellow, g is green, and so on.
So you hold down a tab on the back of each terminal, insert the appropriate wire, and then
release the tab to secure it, and it's pretty simple, but because they had previously
had hooks for the connections, they had stripped more of the wire than was really needed
for my installation, and leaving bare wire is not usually a good idea, so I cut off about
half of the wire and each of them using my needle-nose pliers with the built-in wire cutter.
Then I needed to do a bit more research, since I still had wires left over.
Hmm, is this going to work or not?
A little research online on places like Electronics Hub plus a look at the Google documentation,
and I've got links to all of this in the show notes.
Let me to conclude that the added wires were for features I don't have.
I think when we had that furnace put in, and the old thermostat put in, you know,
they had probably made provision for additional things that could be added later, but
weren't really doing anything.
The black wire, for instance, I had a black wire, and that's a power wire, but the
nest doesn't need a power wire.
The orange wire, which was labeled W2, in my old system, is for a two-stage heating system.
The blue wire labeled W2 in my old system is for a heat pump, which I also don't have.
So I just put electrical tape around the ends of the wires for safety, and then put the
display cover of the nest back on.
Then I took it off again after learning I needed information from the back of it.
Now the installation at this point is done on the Google Home app on my phone, and in fact
there were instructions for everything I already did that are on this phone app.
I suppose I should have gone here sooner, but no harm.
I got there.
The one wrinkle I ran into is that it asked me which wires I had, and I answered for all
of them, which led Google to conclude the nest was not compatible with my system.
But since I had already concluded that I didn't need those wires, I just started over,
and this time told them I only had the four wires W, Y, G, and R, and it was happy.
Anyway, to get this going, I had to read the QR code on the back of the display cover.
Now, this is the thermostat is in basically in two pieces.
The part that mounts directly to the wall where the wires are connected as the electronics
electronic connections, and then there's the display which plugs into it, which sort
of is a cover.
So it was on the back of that that I had to get the QR code once I had done that, I could
put it back, and now once I did that, the Google Home app takes you through several steps,
including, importantly, the Wi-Fi network connection, which is the key to us usefulness.
So I entered that information, then it downloaded updates from the internet, because of
course it did, and I was then ready to configure it.
I set up daytime and nighttime temperatures, which for me means a bit higher during the
day when I'm working, and a little lower at night when I'm sleeping.
I then set the times, so it'd be warming up a half hour before my alarm rose off, and
cools down a half hour before bedtime.
Of course, these can be changed at any time.
Now the final step is applying for my rebate. Our utility here, DTE, which to trite
something energy, offers rebates for energy saving appliances and a smart thermostat qualifies
for a $50 rebate. That makes it worth jumping through one or two hoops to get, so I
filled out the paperwork.
And now as I write this, my home is nice and warm, and my new thermostat seems to be
doing a great job. The last step is to make it pretty.
I thought I could get the trim kit delivered overnight from Amazon, and so I ordered it.
And when it came, I found what I had to do is go and take everything apart, because the
trim kit has to be the first thing that goes against the wall.
So I had to remove the display cover, then unscrew and remove the base plate in the process
removing the wire connections, then I could put the trim plate on, reinstall the back plate,
we make all the electrical connections, put the display cover back on, and now it seems
to be working just fine.
And the only thing is there's a little bit of unpainted wall because the display plate,
the trim plate that I got from the Google thing, doesn't quite cover everything that the
old thermostat covered.
But that's pretty minor, you know, just a little dash of paint will solve that, but
I'm probably going to let my wife handle it because she's the one who handles those kinds
of things.
So anyway, this is Hoka for Hacker Public Radio signing off and encouraging everyone
to support free software.
Bye-bye.
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