Just purchased a cyberstat wifi thermostat to control my heat pump at the vacation house. I keep the temp at 42' when I'm not there just to keep things from freezing. When I get there, I fire up the stove. Depending on outside temps, it can take many hours to get the house comfy. The hope was to pre-heat the house a bit before I got there so that I could convince my wife to come as well...
Don't want to use the aux heat though, really ever. I don't care how long it takes to heat up, and really if I can get it to the mid/upper 50's even, that makes a big difference. I'm thinking I can just disconnect (or better yet, install a SPST micro switch in line) with the W wire, which from what I've read controls the aux heat. My concern is that this wire also seems involved in the defrost cycle of the heat pump, and I don't want to screw that up. It looks like it's only function in the defrost is as an output from the heat pump--during the defrost cycle, the pump signals the tstat through the W wire to turn on the aux heat during the defrost. In other words, during the defrost cycle, the heat pump isn't heating, so the strip heat is turned on temporarily to keep some heat coming out. If this is its only function, I could disable that as well...
Don't want to use the aux heat though, really ever. I don't care how long it takes to heat up, and really if I can get it to the mid/upper 50's even, that makes a big difference. I'm thinking I can just disconnect (or better yet, install a SPST micro switch in line) with the W wire, which from what I've read controls the aux heat. My concern is that this wire also seems involved in the defrost cycle of the heat pump, and I don't want to screw that up. It looks like it's only function in the defrost is as an output from the heat pump--during the defrost cycle, the pump signals the tstat through the W wire to turn on the aux heat during the defrost. In other words, during the defrost cycle, the heat pump isn't heating, so the strip heat is turned on temporarily to keep some heat coming out. If this is its only function, I could disable that as well...