It’s just another sign of aging, I guess, but among all the other mysteries of modernity I can’t solve, now I can’t figure out how to work my thermostat. I never had a problem with our old thermostat – flip a toggle to “heat,” push the up arrow or the down arrow and hear that comforting click, the sound of the furnace kicking on, followed by the gush of warmth coming from the vents. Worked just fine for the past 17 years. But then the furnace’s “inducer motor” “seized,” a very bad thing to happen to a furnace, apparently. I tried my highly advanced technique of squirting WD40 (the liquid equivalent of duct tape, a product that can fix many problems) into the motor, which did get the thing going again, but with a grinding sound that I knew couldn’t be normal.
So, our 17-year-old furnace went the way of my 1994 Honda (see previous blog posts for that sad story). The new furnace went in pretty easily and then came the bad news, which the nice furnace man said was the good news. We were getting a new thermostat, too. This thermostat knows when I walk past it (lighting up when I stand in front of it, like the freezer aisle in the supermarket). It tells me the temperature in the room and the weather outside, and there are 7 other icons on the screen which probably are trying to tell me other things. I have to tell my thermostat things, too. It asks if I want the “home” setting, or the “away” setting or the “sleep” setting. It asks for my heating schedule – when do I want it to kick in if I’m not here. And if I am here, it kicks in anyway unless I tell it not to, which I don’t know how to do yet. When I tell the furnace I want the “sleep” setting, it tells me when it will go off because it assumes I’ll be awake by then.
Hooray, our new thermostat also has an app! Although I still haven’t figured out how to get my doorbell camera app to work on my phone (yes, maybe it’s because I’m still using my iPhone 6s – see prior blog posts for that humbling story), now I have to put an app on my phone so I can control my thermostat when I’m not home. Have I ever needed to do that in the past? Of course not! If we weren’t home, we would set the old thermostat to a temperature above the pipe-freezing temperatures that might be forecast (we live in Denver, where pipes do freeze) and if the house temp dropped to that level, the thermostat would turn on the furnace. Our pipes never froze using this admittedly primitive strategy. But now I’ll be able to control my thermostat with my phone? Yeah, right.
I’m not a Luddite, but close. I understood my old thermostat and it understood me. If my pipes do freeze this winter, I’ll say I told you so.
