THE #1 AV NEWS PUBLICATION. PERIOD.

Thermostats And Unintended Consquences

PRO 4000

You don’t really think about thermostats much, until you NEED one.

An awful lot of my blog posts are inspired by things breaking.

There was my antique DVD player a couple of weeks ago.* And before that, over the years, various other pieces of equipment.

Well, this week my thermostat croaked.

It didn’t croak in the sense that “OMG! Winter is coming, the furnace won’t work and WE’RE GOING TO FREEZE!”

Nothing so dramatic as that.

Rather, the sublimated buttons on the surface were cracked and failed. The thermostat was still reading the air temperature and firing the burners on the forced air furnace, but we could no longer adjust the heat up or down.

So, I shopped around, and went to Amre Supply to find a new one.

The replacement I selected, the Honeywell PRO 4000 turned out to offer some small, but to my mind substantial improvements over the old one it’s replacing.

The first, is that it uses actual buttons, rather than sublimated ones, and I’m hoping that means they’ll have greater longevity.

Next, the backlit green LCD screen is nice, it means we don’t have to turn the hall light on anymore to adjust the thermostat.

Lastly, but the one that really made me happy was that the new one uses phoenix connectors on the mounting plate to attach the control wires.

phoenix connectors

Unlike this pic mine was a simple 3-wire setup.

The old model used screw terminals on the back of the thermostat itself, similar the contacts on the inside of a 2-plug electrical outlet, only requiring an eyeglass screwdriver, and WAY more fiddly. That made installing the new thermostat a snap.

Finally, there were a couple of unanticipated surprises, one pleasant, one less so.

The first was that, at least with Honeywell thermostats over the years (the old one was a Honeywell, too) the spacing on the mounting plate is standardized, so I didn’t have to drill new holes in the wall.

The second, and less pleasant was that because the new thermostat isn’t as wide as the old one, you can totally see the lines from when we had the house painted two years ago.

honeywell pro 4000

Does this bug you as much as this bugs me?

You can’t win them all, I suppose.

*If you’re looking for closure on my DVD drama, it cost me $190 to have it fixed at a Denon-authorized repair center. Good enough to avoid having to shop for a Bluray player.

Top