Huge thanks to Bryan Gangwere (@bgangwere) for getting a lot of the thermostats in the space hooked up to allow the heaters to run. For those of you who didn’t know, the space originally came with old-school mercury thermostats. These types of thermostats suck, they are inaccurate and many of them were in poor condition. We switched them out for wifi thermostats (so we can more easily manage the 8 systems). The problem was that the original thermostats needed only 4 control wires (+24v, cooling, heating and fan), while the newer ones needed a fifth wire for common/negative.
Rather than run new wires while the temperature outside was in the triple digits, we chose to re-purpose the heating wire to common/negative. This made sense, as we didn’t even have the gas turned on, so the heaters had no way to run (they are the only devices that use natural gas at the space). The downside, of course, was that we had no way to turn on the heater.
Once the temperatures began to drop, Bryan offered to run new wires for the thermostats. Luckily, Paul Brown (@pawl) found a much simpler solution, a “magic box” that allowed us to use the existing 4 conductor wire, but have 5 wires on either end. Last week Bryan got the first “magic box” installed, we turned on the gas and the open work area and arts rooms were again warm. This weekend, Bryan upgraded the thermostats for the following areas:
- Front hall, 3d fab, electronics
- Pillar room, bathrooms, conference rooms (yes, this is all on one unit, it’s weird)
- Hands-on classroom
We’ll work to get the remaining units upgraded in the coming weeks, but at this time the areas in most need of heating are now heated. Again, huge thanks to our volunteers Bryan and Paul.
