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Well, this isn’t the post that I had planned on posting again.  The other one…just isn’t coming together.  Mostly because I haven’t had the time/energy/state of mind to actually work on it.  The idea of it still amuses me though.  That’s something?  But this post is still late.  Sorry.

I replaced my thermostat.  I had a pretty old one with analog controls and used mercury.  It wasn’t completely ancient as I realized it that actually was programmable.  I don’t think I’ve ever used that function though.

I was actually fine with using this ancient thermostat to control my AC and heater except that my friend, the A pusher, kept telling me about her wifi thermostat and how nice it was to be able to see the temperature of the house and having the option to bring the temperature of the house to a comfortable range before getting home.  For the longest time, I thought this was terribly extravagant.  But then…that whole heat wave thing.

So, the heat wave didn’t affect me as much since I spend a good amount of time inside my cage at clib (yes, they keep me in a cage). If I’m not in my cage at clib, then I’m driving to and from clib, and I keep the air on in my car.  When I’m at home and it gets really hot, I can do things like give up wearing jeans and wear shorts instead, or I can take cold showers, or I can put my hair up, or I can drink cold water, or I can stop eating…hot food.  I actually don’t eat much in hot weather.  I subsist mostly on watermelon and cereal.

But the heat…it affects my dogs.  They have it better than some other dogs in that they can come inside and get out of the sun, but if the temperature inside the house is over 90 deg, I’m not sure how much better it is to be inside than outside.  Their undercoats do function like insulation and can keep them cool for a bit, but that only works for so long.  After a while, it’s just hot.  They might be able to lie down on tile and their water source is inside, but their options quite limited in trying to cool off.  How hard and how fast can you actually pant?

I also may have read a few reports recently on police dogs being trapped in patrol vehicles and basically being roasted alive.  That’s a terrible thing to inflict on any living creature.  I definitely do not wish that upon my dogs even if it’s a terribly unlikely that the interior my house would reach those kinds of temperatures.

Thus, it was really because of this reason I decided that I needed a wifi thermostat so I could monitor the temperature inside the house even while I was away and turn on the AC for the dogs in case it got too hot.  Luckily for me, my dad had gotten inside his head the last time he was here that the ancient thermostat we had was broken.  It’s not.  He only thought so because he was in the smallest room with the doors closed and with a full vent.  It was obviously going to be colder in that room than in the larger room where the thermostat is installed.  I tried explaining that to him once and he didn’t bother listening to me.  He really wanted to get a new thermostat.  I didn’t argue anymore after that.

This happened months ago and I didn’t get around to installing the thermostat until just recently.  Because I’ve been incredibly busy/tired/lazy/unmotivated to do so.  I only decided to do it now because I actually had a chunk of time over the weekend AND there was going to be another heat wave.  But tada!  I have a new thermostat!  I can control the temperature of my house even when I’m not there!  I can make sure my dogs are reasonably comfortable!  But now instead of worrying about if my dogs are being roasted alive, I get to worry instead about whether someone will hack into my thermostat.  We live in a weird world.

Btw, thermostats are easy to install.  The mounting holes for my previous ones matched the mounting holes for the current one.  I didn’t feel like looking for the actual level so I downloaded a level app on my phone.  Of course, the footprint of the new thermostat isn’t the same as the old one so I have this really ugly spot on the wall that I’m going to have to sand and repaint at some point.

I also found out that whoever wired my old AC was fond of splicing wire together.  That was pretty annoying.  I found out because I was tracing to see if I had extra wire in the cable to bring a C wire through.  The old thermostat didn’t use the C wire and the new one does to provide power to the thing.  While I was tracing the wire, I found wire nuts everywhere.  I fortunately have a meter on hand and some wire cutters/strippers so that I could trace and rewire stuff…but whyyyyy did someone feel he need to splice 3-4 cables together???


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