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My thermostat is in the sitting room and I have an open fire, so as soon as the room is nicely warm and cozy, the central heating goes off and the rest of the house is cold. I have heard about WiFi thermostats. Might this be the answer and would it mean taking out the original thermostat? I rent the house.

Tester101
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Charlotte Buchanan
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3 Answers3

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You've got a few options:

  • Stop burning fires. Even without throwing off the thermostat, they tend to make the house colder, not warmer, because all the heat is sucked up the flue. The exception to this is a high efficiency wood stove.

  • Turn up the thermostat to compensate. You'll end up constantly adjusting it as the fire dies down.

  • Replace your thermostat with a wireless sensor. This is wired either at the furnace or where your existing thermostat is located, and can be easily undone when you move out. The level of effort is no different than replacing your thermostat (several wires to attach and not accidentally lose in the wall).

  • Move the thermostat. Since your renting, this can be difficult, but the landlord may be willing to do this as gregmac and bcworkz mention below. If all you're doing is moving the thermostat to the other side of the wall, this is an easy change.

BMitch
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    (Ask your landlord to) move the thermostat permanently. If it's a problem for you, it's a problem for anyone else in the future having a fire. – gregmac Dec 18 '12 at 22:53
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    To expand on gregmac's comment, if moving the thermostat to the other side of the wall at it's current position would improve the situation, this is very easy to do. The hardest part is patching the small holes left from it's current positioning. – bcworkz Dec 18 '12 at 23:09
  • Regarding your first point: Wasn't there a time when most houses were heated entirely by wood-burning fireplaces? What has changed? – ArgentoSapiens Dec 19 '12 at 17:56
  • @ArgentoSapiens houses got bigger and we went from one fireplace in each room to an accent piece in the living room. The decorative fireplaces aren't designed to heat your home the way they did in the past. You also had more wood stoves, which are much more efficient at generating heat. – BMitch Dec 19 '12 at 18:26
  • @BMitch, thanks for the information. Can you explain how a decorative fireplace is different from an old-fashioned one capable of heating a house? – ArgentoSapiens Dec 19 '12 at 18:36
  • @ArgentoSapiens Many of the older fireplaces would have a large open stone back wall that would reflect heat back into the room, along with a lot of soot up on the mantel. Today's fireplaces tend to be designed to contain the fire for safety. But more important than the design of a single fireplace is that we often only have one fireplace now. Your living room is warmer, it's just that the rest of the home isn't being heated by it, and the added draft causes them to cool down much faster. – BMitch Dec 19 '12 at 18:44
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    I'm intrigued by the notion of using a roaring fire to cool my house down in the summer, rather than my expensive air conditioner. – Aric TenEyck Dec 19 '12 at 22:24
  • @ArgentoSapiens I think you might find the history of heating and cooling episode of Back Story interesting. I think the answer to your "wasn't there a time…" question is "no." – derobert Dec 20 '12 at 21:31
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    @AricTenEyck The fire heats up air the air around it, and especially above it (it also depletes the oxygen in that air, and fills it with combustion products). That hot air—which was in your house—rises out of the chimney. Your house now has a very slight vacuum in it, so outside air comes in to replace it. In the winter, that outside air is very cold—hence it cools your house down. If you tried that in the summer, the outside air would be hot, and would heat your house up. – derobert Dec 20 '12 at 21:34
  • @derobert, don't forget about radiation heat transfer. Thanks for the link. – ArgentoSapiens Dec 20 '12 at 22:49
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    I don't think moving the thermostat is going to help you. Let's say you do, and the thermostat calls for more heat. And your fire is still roaring. Your sitting room is going to become quite uncomfortable, as the heat from the fire is supplemented by that of your furnace. Sure the rest of the house will warm up nicely, but you'll be sweating by the fire. – Mike Dec 21 '12 at 01:17
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WiFi thermostats allow you to control them remotely (they connect to your LAN via WiFi); they are not wirelessly connected to the furnace.

Another option is upgrading to a thermostat that supports multiple temperature probes. You would leave the thermostat where it is but add a remote probe in another location. The thermostat will take an average which should improve the situation. This might be a bit easier to install since you only have to run a wire for the new probe versus running a new wire all the way back to your furnace.

Steven
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  • Right - you don't so much need a wifi thermostat as you need a thermostat with a remote temperature sensor. You set the temperature and wire to your furnace at the existing thermostat location, but the thermostat reads whatever temperature is at the sensor's location, not the thermostat's location. You can have a thermostat with a wireless sensor that isn't wifi-enabled. – Shimon Rura Dec 21 '12 at 16:04
  • Example: http://www.amazon.com/Day-Progrmable-Thermostat-Multi-stage-1F95-377/dp/B005LVR5MY/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1356105916&sr=8-3&keywords=thermostat+with+remote+sensor and http://www.amazon.com/White-Rodgers-Indoor-Remote-Compatible-Thermostats/dp/B000CAQL56/ref=pd_bxgy_hi_text_y – Shimon Rura Dec 21 '12 at 16:07
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It may work to move the thermostat out of your sitting room, preferably on a wall that is not adjacent to the sitting room. The thermostat is really for the rest of the house, and you don't really care how much the heat operates in the rest of the house while you're cozy. You could hire a budding young electronics enthusiast to use their Arduino + Wi-Fi + thermistor sensor skills to replace the thermostat with a relay+wifi and place another microcontroller, the "remote" part, to sense the temperature and send that info back to the "home station" which turns the heater on or off (with hysteresis) for the rest of the house. This particularly makes sense because you're renting. When you vacate, you could just replace the original thermostat.

MicroservicesOnDDD
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