Did you all know that thermostats have batteries? And that (at least some of them) don’t work if the batteries die?
We woke up this morning to the house at 52 degrees f, which is damn cold. Especially for the last day of May! Looked at the thermostat display, which was helpfully totally blank. Oh, well. we had replaced both of them at the same time mumble years ago. About three years ago the one downstairs had died and we replaced it. (We in the sense I stood there holding a flashlight and handing over screwdrivers on request.) The upstairs one was running fine, so we left it alone. So, clearly, this one had simply given up the ghost a few years after its brother. Fine. We added ‘trip to the hardware store’ to tomorrow’s agenda, and I watched a couple of youtube vids about replacing Honeywell thermostats in prep for my important role to come.
Which reminded me: I’d better check to see if the flashlight batteries were okay. And as I was standing there at the junk drawer, I thought, hmmm. Batteries? The CO monitor screams at us when its batteries are low, but I’ve never even heard of anyone replacing a thermostat battery. Hubby pooh-poohed the idea. Apparently the thermostat also sucks its power from the house current by wire, and so the batteries only matter if you have a prolonged power outage, which we haven’t had for years.
Still. I said, well, how hard is it to check? And he ‘humored’ me by pulling off the thermostat … and discovered the batteries in fact had partially split open and disgusting gross stuff was growing out of them! Well, he figured that was what had probably killed the thermostat but at my suggestion/nagging he managed to dig the old batteries out (they were dated 2003!), and brushed out the cavity well to clean away the crud, and popped in the new ones I handed him (handing stuff to the doer is clearly the peak of my repair talents!) and the thermostat display rose from the dead!
Turned out the thing actually somehow remembers our programmed settings even after "dying’, so he snapped it back into place and within two minutes the baseboard heaters ticked back into service.
Let’s hear it for my technological expertise!