We don’t need to control heating and cooling with alternate thermostats in different rooms, switching back and forth between them. There is a digital solution already out there! There is such a thing as a “wireless thermostat”. Mount the base unit in place of the old thermostat. Carry the wireless thermostat anywhere you want in the house. The heating and cooling system will respond to the temperature in the room where the wireless thermostat is; the living room in the evening, the bedroom at night, the office during the day. If we want, we can close floor vents in rooms we’re not using in different parts of the day without screwing up the balance of the whole system. That will even save energy; directing flow to where we need it when we need it. Simple. I can hardly wait. Thanks for all the help getting me pointed the right direction.
The (almost) perfect solution
The golf cart batteries tend to go dead when we leave them alone for months at a time. This time though, we got smart. We disconnected the negative terminal while we were gone so there could be no electrical draw; no drain. Doing that worked great, except that in the intervening months, we forgot we had disconnected the batteries, so when we got home we thought the batteries were dead. We tried charging them to no avail. Finally, one of us remembered that one of us had disconnected the batteries. Reconnecting the batteries brought us full circle to the perfect solution, except for that part in the middle about forgetting what we had done. Happy to be back in South Texas. Ready to grill and smoke some real food. Now, if only we can figure out what we did with the instant-read thermometer and the remote temperature sensors for the smoker. Been looking since yesterday. We must have done something really clever with them…
“We have met the enemy and he is us.”
Pogo. The war on drugs. A trillion dollars. Has it eliminated, or even reduced, drug use in our country? I don’t think so. The war on immingration. Has it reduced the number of illegals crossing our borders to work? Yeah. Probably. But is that a good thing? Is that what we really want? In each of these cases, it’s not people forcing anything on us, it’s people supplying what we demand. It’s not the mean (and they *are* mean) drug cartels forcing us to use drugs. They’re responding to our demand for them. Is it the bad Mexicans and South Americans forcing us to employ them? No. They’re responding to our demand for low-wage workers. What’s the common denominator? Us! We’re the ones creating the demand. We can’t solve an economic problem by focusing all our attention on the suppliers. We need to look to the source of the demand. What the next logical step then? Go after the ones causing the problem. Withdraw from the war on drugs and the war on immigrants. It’s time for a war on us!
I’ve been thinking
For the last two months we’ve been living in the bus with ideal temperature control. There are two different thermostats; one for the front one for the back. In fact, there are two completely separate air conditioners. They can each be set for the best temperature in that part of the motorhome. We also have two different heater zones. One heater, but two different zones, controlled by those two separate thermostats. It works great. We get any temperature we want in every room. Now we get back to the big house (actually small by most standards, but 4 times the size of the RV), and it only has one thermostat, located in a short hallway between the living room and the office at the very front. That location provides direct temperature control for the front part of the house, heating and cooling (mostly cooling), but only indirect control for consistent temperature throughout the rest of the house. We can balance the heating or cooling by opening and closing vents around the house, but as outside temperatures change, it changes the way the vents need to be balanced; a challenge to get everything just right. At night we’re trying to control the heat in the bedroom three rooms away from the thermostat. This is probably normal for most houses, but we’re spoiled by how well the motorhome heating and cooling works. So here is my thought: We have one big air conditioner outside that feeds the whole house. It wouldn’t make sense to duplicate that to create a different air conditioning zone in the house. Wouldn’t it be cool though, if we could wire in another thermostat in the bedroom and be able to switch from one thermostat to the other, the front to the back, depending on the time of day and which room we wanted the most direct control over? We could use the front thermostat during the day and the rear thermostat at night. I wonder if that would be possible.
Home Again
2014 summer/fall trip map About 10 weeks on the road. Four-and-a-half thousand miles. We’re back at Sandpipers. No more traveling to report for a while. In the meantime, can you spot the turtle basking on a log in the Medina River?
Scroll down… (It’s a trick question.)
Scroll down… (It’s a trick question.)