Installing an Electronic Thermostat

Last summer we were thinking of putting our home on the real estate market and upgrading to a newer, bigger place. While making the house ready for showings and open house viewings, we made a list of ALL the things that needed to be done before we created a listing for Realtors. Since our home was built over 10 years ago one of the first things on the list was replacing the thermostat.

The thermostat we had was old and brown and required that we manually find the right temperature by sliding a little bar at the bottom. In short, it was very archaic and not too trendy. We thought this would be a very complicated job and so we procrastinated until finally my husband decided to take the dreaded plunge. It turned out to be one of the simpler installations on our list of do it yourself projects.

After spending hours at the Home Depot store looking at a number of different brands we finally decided on Honeywell. Not only was it very modern and sleek but also environmentally friendly. The thermostat also came with a very comprehensive guide for installation and configuration.

To be on the safe side, our first course of action was to turn off the electrical breakers. This of course, caused the entire house to be out of electricity but it was worth not getting shocked. The old thermostat was itself very low voltage, so removing it was not a very risky process.

Once we removed the cover off the old thermostat we carefully labeled the wires according to the instructions that came with the new one. We then fully removed the old thermostat from the wall and started matching the wires to the new one. The matching process was very easy for us with the Honeywell system. Once the batteries were in the system, it ran smoothly and perfectly. We absolutely love our new sleek Honeywell thermostat with its little pointer that allows us to easily adjust the temperature on a digital screen.

This was a very inexpensive project for us because the price of the product was $99.99 and we installed it ourselves. There are more expensive versions of thermostats on the market with better technology that will even allow you to program them for whatever temperatures are anticipated. If however, you are a DIY person or if you have a limited budget, this option worked well for us and may be the exact solution you seek.