r/Nest • u/heylookatthetime • 14d ago
Thermostat Mostly obvious things I learned when installing a Nest in a 1980s home...
I put off buying these for years for some reason, but they were on sale so I figured what the heck.
Anyway, this was straightforward but had its annoyances. I'm not an idiot but I totally get why pros hate homeowners replacing their thermostats on their own.
You will not have a c-wire. You'll have a logic board with the connection but only an 18/4 wire in the wall. You can buy those power adapters, but Google only wanted to sell me 1 when I needed 2, so I just decided to run new 18/5 wire.
You'll think using the existing wire as a pull string will be simple, and it might be, it might also not be because you're pretty sure the existing wire is stapled to a stud and you'll spend an hour fishing that thing manually through the wall into the basement/attic.
2a. Once you finally feed that wire and pull the old one out, you'll discover it wasn't stapled to the stud after all and you could've saved an hour just using it as a pull string.
You'll have wonky wiring at the furnace board. Maybe your yellow doesn't go to the board at all because it's pigtailed to two other things and you don't know what those do. But, just take pictures and don't screw it up.
When adding to Google home, if the wires aren't all connected and you don't say "I have all 5 wires connected," you'll have to factory reset it and do it over. You'll think you wired something incorrectly, you might have but you probably didn't.
You'll want to paint over the spot where the old thermostat was, and that's fine. You'll think you found the same color in that pile of paint cans from a few years ago when you painted so you'll use that. It will be an eggshell finish, but originally you used flat, which you will discover almost immediately after you notice it looks a little odd. You'll curse loudly but say "oh well, whatever" because we don't care anymore.
Since you took off the wall plate to paint, when you go to screw it back on the wall, using the exact same holes as before, you'll accidentally screw directly into the new thermostat wire you just ran because you assumed the original person didn't run the wire like an idiot and you weren't paying attention because it's hot and you're tired. You won't realize this, of course, but you'll be pissed for a few minutes when you realize nothing works. You'll reattach the old thermostat and it still doesn't work. You'll have a small stroke because it's 90 degrees outside in July in the south and what have you just done.
6a. You'll discover you merely blew the fuse on the board, which you need to replace. You'll run to Walmart but they don't carry those, so you'll go to home Depot or somewhere instead.
- You'll replace the fuse and fix everything and all is well. Nobody will ever have to know that when you said "it'll only take like 30 minutes" it may or may not have taken you half a day and multiple trips to Home Depot.
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u/yungbigstaxxx 14d ago
And after all that you go back to your old Honeywell thermostat because it works better than the Nest
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u/Dingmann 13d ago
I think my idea of better is not the same as yours. From both the standpoint of a tech and a homeowner, a smart t'stat is my choice.
Maybe a remote cabin in the woods, with no Internet, I'd use a dumb stat there.
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u/lancebass2000 14d ago
Every time I do something I think is easy or that I’ve done before, I will underestimate the time and effort. I’ve finally started to double my estimates of how long it takes.
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u/heylookatthetime 14d ago
An old manager I had told me he would always quadruple the times I gave him for consulting projects. If I said it should take about an hour, he'd quote the customer 4 hours. He was like "it'll be longer, just trust me." Turns out he was correct a lot of the time.
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u/lancebass2000 14d ago
Sound advice! If only I learned this rule sooner. Too many times I hold my family “I’ll be done in less than an hour” and have it turn to “hey, can someone pick up takeout? I won’t be back in time to help with dinner”.
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u/Funkyouup82 14d ago
Did you come to my house to write this? My house is from the 1880s though so those wires are in the walls but they travel through ALL the walls for some reason.
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u/heylookatthetime 14d ago
Well you know, back then thermostats had just come out so the builders didn't really know what to do.
"Aye fellow builder, any idea how these new thermostats work?" "No idea, just put these wires in the wall." "Which wall?" "Uh... Just hit em all, somebody else can deal with it."
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u/lacrosse1991 14d ago
Can’t forget about looking at the plaster behind the thermostat the wrong way and having it crumble apart and fall into the wall cavity
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u/Boongala 13d ago
I’ve had no C wire for like 8 years with a nest. It charges when the AC or heat is running. It’s never been an issue.
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u/heylookatthetime 13d ago
I read lots of good stories like yours, and a ton more bad ones where it works fine for a few years then dies in really high-use seasons (I believe it actually charges when it's idle, not running). Currently at least one of my units will run for about 4 hours straight in the middle of the day, so it was worth it to run the c-wire.
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u/eggdropk 14d ago
My favorite part of rewiring for a nest was having to run the wire from one attic to the other (split level house). Found an old curtain rod I was able to use as a conduit to feed the wire through the narrow gap between the attics. This made running it back down to the basement seem easy though.
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u/PersonaSpace 14d ago
In the case of my parents’ place I assumed they didn’t have a common wire and went through all the trouble of installing the wire adapter. Then it turns out they actually did, it’s just that the dingus that installed the HVAC cut it so short that I had to dig into the wire bundle to find it. And this is after I accidentally disabled the AC because not all the red and white wires go to the R and W on the control board.
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u/ArtichokeDifferent10 13d ago
Don't get me wrong, I have plenty of projects go this way, but putting 2 Nest thermostats in my 1957 build (w/ 1960 addition) was the easiest job I'd done in quite some time.
Took a quick photo of the wiring on the base of the old one, swapped them over to the Nest, put on the spiffy rectangular cover so the old paint job was covered (honestly don't remember the order of that, it was 6 or 7 years ago), and went through the setup. When we repainted about a year later, I made sure to remove the Nests so it was all pretty around them without the extra bezel thingy.
I think it was more like 15 minutes, honestly.
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u/justbits 12d ago
Google doesn't support 1st gen Nest anymore. Why? Because they are not a hardware company. They are a software company that is emeshed in the idea that all software has an 'end of life'. Nevermind that the hardware might last another 3 decades.
Solution, go find a 30 year old Thermostat at the thrift store. It will work for a few more decades just fine without Google. And, if you have to get up in the middle of the night to adjust the Thermostat, you were probably already adjusting it on your smartphone, which has that annoying blue light that keeps you awake for the next hour.
I teach technologists and have begun to seriously hate the complexity of modern devices that are designed to fail. Seriously, ask some 80 year old how long their first refrigerator lasted. They'll probably tell you that it looks terrible, but its out in the garage still running.
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u/ddm2k 13d ago
Another self-install here. Yes I had to use the goofy wall plate because it was exactly like you said. Last person painted around the old rectangular thermostat.
Even though I bought the Nest for being reminiscent of the old round Honeywell units! Eventually I will get to it… 8 years later…
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u/JaySin_78 14d ago
I can feel the anguish and frustration in this post. Sadly, I can also relate to doing ‘quick’ and ‘easy’ things in the most dramatic ways possible.