I Still Suck At Installing A Thermostat

i seem to be on a little handyman tour... a home improvement tour of installing thermostats. too bad i suck at installing a thermostat.

this past friday, i helped install a thermostat at my friend's (jen and bill) new apartment. today, i helped my bff (kerry) install her new thermostat.

with it being veterans day today, i assumed there would not be much traffic heading home from scenic marblehead. as karen was having a dietitians dinner with my friends (hot amy and dolores)... all of whom are both registered dietitians... my parents invited me over for a home-cooked dinner. (my mom gets all excited when i come over for dinner. you'd think that she never sees me or something.)

anyway, with the little traffic, i thought i would have a lot of time to kill until dinner with my parents. so, i decided to stop by kerry's place in neighboring salem. luckily, she was home. it was nice hanging out with kerry. she is still enjoying the north shore and is quite excited for her holiday party this year.

needless to say, kerry asked me to install her new thermostat while i was there. i should probably clarify... the thermostat is not exactly new. it's new to kerry. the thermostat was actually one of three thermostats that karen and i have in our house. during the whole second floor addition to our house, we had the contractors consolidate everything into one furnace which resulted in two unused existing thermostats. yep, it's complicated.

anyway, karen and i gave one of those thermostats to kerry so that she could program and control her heating system. naturally, since i enjoy doing home improvement projects (just not on my own home), i started to install the new digital thermostat.

i started removing the old mercury thermostat, only to discover that the wires behind old thermostat were of different lengths. one wire (the white one) was considerably shorter than the other (the red one). the white wire was so much shorter that it would not reach the terminals of the new thermostat.

as i did not have my tools with me, that obviously became a problem. i needed a wire to create a pigtail so that it could reach the terminals. (i have no idea why the electrical term is called a pigtail because it does not look like any pig's tail that i have ever seen.)

naturally, i figured i would just reattach the existing mercury thermostat and install the digital one at a later date. so i reattached the red wire... and then attempted to attach the shorter white wire... and kept trying... and trying. there was simply no way i could reattach the white wire to the old mercury thermostat. it was just too short. (that is usually where i inject "that's what she said".)

unfortunately, i had to leave to have dinner with my parents. i felt pretty awful because i did not want to leave kerry without any heat in her place. kerry, however, told me not to worry because she would go get the wire and attach the old mercury thermostat herself. so after giving her a quick tutorial on how to create a pigtail, i left and hoped that i did not mess things up too badly for her. hopefully, she would get the heat back on.

as luck would have it... kerry is quite the handyman... or woman. calling from the local home improvement store (home depot), kerry asked me what type of wire was needed. she got the wire and everything. when i checked in with her during dinner with my parents, she had successfully reattached the old mercury thermostat and had the heat back on. yay kerry!

and interestingly enough, kerry just called me again. apparently... the heat is down again at her place... i do not believe the cause to be a result of the thermostat incident. coincidentally, her heat is down due to a broken boiler plate. what luck...

at least it was a good effort. plus, now kerry knows how to install a thermostat. so she can also suck at installing a thermostat too... like me.