I signed up for the
peaksaver PLUSâ„¢ program with the PoCo and will be getting a new t-stat.
http://www.hydroone.com/MyHome/SaveEnergy/Pages/Peaksaver.aspx
To this day I did not hear from them. I did call them a while back and was just told "no resource available" with no further explanation of what that meant or when a resource may become available. Anyway... my furnace was acting goofy on Christmas Day so I just turned it off for a while and put more wood on the stove.
Boxing Day it again started acting up again so decided to go looking for deals on a new thermostat. I followed the recommendation of Honeywell and acquired a RTH8500 thermostat which I installed yesterday. The fire in the wood stove had burned down some and the house cooled enough while we were out shopping that I could give the new T-stat a good test. WELL... the furnace was still goofy.
Nearest I can tell, the condensate drain needs an air gap close to the furnace. The old furnace needed the condensate line to form a trap so that exhaust gas didn't vent out it into the house. It was installed as a 20 foot length of 1/2" PEX with a direct connection and a hump put in it to form a trap. When they hooked it to the new furnace, they hooked it up directly as well.
When I went down to the crawlspace the furnace exhaust blower was running and making a water splashing sound. There was a puddle of water on the floor and inside the furnace as well. When I pulled off the PEX line, water drained out of the furnace. I'm thinking that it must not like the long run with no air gap and with a hump forming a trap. For the time being, I put a heavy pail on the hump of the PEX to flatten it essentially getting rid of the trap. I'll keep an eye on it to see if soot forms in it like it did the old one before the hump was added.
Anyway... I'm still not clear on whether or not I really needed to change the T-stat or not and how this whole "Heating cycle rate" thing is supposed to work. The new RTH8500 has Function 0240 with options 1, 3, 9, and 5 and they look suspiciously similar to what the A and B screws on the old unit did. The manual does nothing to explain what the net result is with each setting. I tried calling their tech support to get clarification. What I was told which was that none of the settings would limit the run-time of the furnace, that the "call for heat" would stay on continuously and the furnace would run (or not) based solely on how the furnace manufacturer designed it. I'm calling it BS.
So... Honeywell points the finger at Payne. Payne refuses to give me details and says call the dealer. The dealer... well... who knows... I called them and asked them to get their facts straight.
Back to Function 0240... my guess is that Option 1 will give me the longest continuous run-time and Option 9 the least. Option 3 is for greater than 90% efficiency and Option 5 is for less than 90% efficiency.