Wi-Fi 7-Day Programmable Thermostat
Well this little thermostat has been the bane of my existance. Every time one fails it's 200$ I'm out. It will be the coldest day of the year and wake at 3am to the AC blowing. Or come home in the summer to the heater being on. After a bit of arguing with Honeywell and a bit of disrespect I have sworn them off. As these devices fail I'll be purchasing Nest thermstats.
However I decided to do some testing on the device. I started noticing some inconsistancies. What acted like a crowbarred relay tests showed they were fine. So I did some searching to find a customer that said his device was flipped out and did everything in reverse and one post suggested changing to heat pump. That solved his problem. Hmm. I wonder. I threw a 24 volt source to it and went to setting #1 to see what it was set at. The default setting is 0 for conventional heat and air. It was on setting 1 for heat pump. There was other settings changed as well except WiFi and schedule. So it wasn't like a voltage spike scrammed it. It was selectively changed.
I pulled my manual thermostat from the garage and reinstalled this one. And low and behold it worked. Now this is concerning. There's only two ways to change these settings. From the panel or from from the Honeywell management portal. Guess where it didn't happen at. Bingo! I didn't get up at 3am to switch to a different climate control type on the coldest day of the year. What better way to artificially roll in more cash for Honeywell. At 200$ a pop this has cost me 600$ in thermostats and 180$ for a technicion visit. So 780$ lost.
So my recommendation is to stay away from Honeywell. I have now have it installed in my garage. And my Fortigate running packet capture on their server to capture the next time they pull this crap.
UPDATE: I found thermostat #2 and did the same thing and it to was changed to heat pump. Chances are if I still had the first one I'd find the same thing. This is very dishonest.
Brief shop cleaning
I haven't posted in awhile as I have been out of sorts. Went to the emergency room a few weeks ago with 3 kidney stones. 10mm, 3mm on the right and 7.5mm on the left. I ended up with a stent installed about a day later. Then it's been nothing but hurry up and wait to have a procedure done to have them blown up. Yesterday I tried to do some cleaning in the garage and work on my wife's bike that Bob WB5WLZ gave me. I was just rolling around on my drum throne when I turned the wrong way and went from rainbows and lollipops to hell on earth. I have a week until the first procedure and 2 weeks after that to have the silly straw removed.
Kat loves the retro look of the bike. It dates back to the 70's from a company out of Dallas. I'm going to see if I can carefully open the light and install a small super capacitor and a kingbright LED. Tires, liners and tubes should be here today. If it all works good I'll take it apart and powdercoat the whole bike. Possibly the same blue and the shiny make white.
Here's where I got with the desk before I got shutdown by the pain.
My Childhood
I probably mentioned this story before to my friends, but to the folks that are new to the site. Many years ago in the mid 70's I found a radio just like this one in the trash. I took it home and tore it apart and then reassembled it. Only to find that it worked afterwards. In south Texas at the time there wasn't allot of options for TV and radio, but I had found this one station that at 10pm would play radio serials and these were those serial (link below). From there on I was bringing all manor of junk home and learning and building new things just for the end result. It was like junkie needing a fix. It just snowballed from there to where I am today.
Relocated the VHF/UHF Antenna
When I moved it from the chimney to the attic I didn't think there would be a problem. However that apparently that wasn't the case. It's literally been raised 5ft now. I think I really should have did this to begin with a year ago.
Slinky Antenna Failed
Well the Slinky antenna failed. Seems I went through this before and failed. Anyhow yesterday when it was almost dark I slapped up a 53ft endfed. I scabbed together a bunch of pieces of 14thhn until I hit the magical 53ft. Took the 9:1 unun from the slinky antenna. Then I climbed the tree again for my rope and bungie. I hope it doesn't matter that the source is higher than the end. It's going south-south-east to north-north-east. Maybe this will work for Tuesday.
Dangit. I keep forgetting about that phone box hanging by it's wires.
