With winter on the way and the temperature dropping I thought it about time to upgrade my thermostat to allow a bit more control, especially good on those days you don’t want to get out of bed just to turn on the heater.

I was keen on getting a NEST however the $300+ price tag seemed a bit much just for a thermostat so I settled on the Insteon Thermostat which will link in with my other Insteon gear.

The first step was to run a new wire to the thermostat as the current one only uses two wires (+24 and Heat) wheres the Insteon Thermostat requires +24, common, heat and fan (and cooling if used)

For this reason it pays to check both your thermostat and also the heater control board as the “dumb” base thermostats may not use all the wires available even if they are present (Heater was not listed as being compatible based on the thermostat but works fine with the extra wires connected)

I pulled a length of CAT5 from the heater to the thermostat and set about rewiring the heater, lucky enough the manufacturer was nice enough to put the wiring diagram on the control board:

As you can hopefully see below I’ve replaced the old wiring with CAT5 using four terminals now rather than two.

And then matched up on the Insteon Thermostat:

And up and running 🙂

Setup with the Insteon hub and app was easy. Open the app -> add device -> thermostat. App will inform you to hold the Set button on the thermostat till it beeps then the two sync up. After it’s done you are presented with this screen allowing control:

I then setup wake, leave, return and sleep programs for week days so the heater will come on just before my alarm, switch off as I’m leaving, turn back on as I’m leaving work and shut off when I go to bed.

Programming details were not included in the quick start guide in the box and I had to find a PDF of them on the Insteon website, I’ve uploaded a copy here.

Now to wait till morning and see if I wake up nice and warm 🙂