The Money Mustache Community
Learning, Sharing, and Teaching => Ask a Mustachian => Topic started by: Scotland2016 on July 14, 2019, 09:35:26 AM
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Hello, I am hoping someone can shed some light on what it may cost to fix our thermostat situation or if there is a way we can deal with it ourselves.
Our house has two air conditioners. One cools the bedrooms (at opposite sides of the house) and one cools the rest of the house. The trouble is the thermostats are located in dumb places. The bedroom thermostat is in the great room. The living area thermostat is in the hallway near the second and third bedrooms. We would prefer to just cool the bedrooms at night, but because the bedroom thermostat is in the living area, the air conditioner runs all night because it thinks it's hot in the bedrooms. Similarly, when we want to cool the living area, we have to turn the thermostat much lower than necessary because it's reading the temperature in the already cool part of the house in the hallway.
Any thoughts or suggestions? I know nothing about HVAC systems or thermostats. Thank you in advance!
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It's just wiring, so it all comes down to how close the desired locations are to the current locations or to the HVAC equipment. If you can easily get a wire between either of those places it should be pretty easy/cheap, if not then it won't.
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You could look into a thermostat like an Ecobee. They have remote sensors so you can heat or cool off of a different room location easily.
For example, I like to sleep with my room cold, but don't want to freeze out my young kids. The remote sensor allows me to sleep with a window cracked while maintaining the kids rooms at 68 degrees. I do this by setting the sleeping set point off of the remote sensors in their rooms and removing the main sesnor from control in my bedroom. Very intuitive and easy to set up with no extra wiring. Remote sensors are battery powered.
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Yep, the cheapest/easiest solution to this is the Ecobee. Put remote sensors in the relevant rooms and program different sensors to be active at different times depending on where you are in the house. We were able to get rebates from both our electric and gas providers when we bought ours.