A new wireless room thermostat, an ESi, fitted with its receiver.
The first photograph is the thermostat on its stand. The display reads 21.5 in big figures, with the time beside it, the date underneath, MAN for manual, and 23.0 in the corner under the word SET. Down in the bottom left corner a small flame is showing. The second photograph is the other half of it: the receiver on the wall, ESi on the front, a Heating button with its ring lit red and a Manual Override button beside it.
Two halves, one thermostat
A wireless room thermostat comes in two parts, and that is the whole idea of it. The thermostat runs on batteries and has no cable at all, so it can sit in whichever room you want kept warm, on a stand like this one or on the wall. It reads the temperature where it is and sends that to the receiver by radio. The receiver is the half that is wired in, usually somewhere near the boiler, and it does the switching: heating on while the room is below the figure the thermostat is set to, heating off once the room gets there. So the flame on the display and the red ring on the receiver are the two ends saying the same thing, 21.5 in a room set to 23.0, and the heating on. It is also why people choose one over a wired thermostat. A wired one has to go wherever its cable can be run, which in an older house is often the hallway, usually the coldest part of it and the place nobody sits. A wireless one goes in the room that matters, and it can be moved later without anyone lifting a floorboard or chasing a wall.
The receiver end
People type "do I need an electrician to install a wireless thermostat" into Google, and "can a plumber install a thermostat" straight after it.
On this job the answer was both. The thermostat end is a heating control, and our boiler page says thermostats, programmers and cylinder controls are part of the same job as the boiler. The receiver end is wiring, a supply in and a switched connection out to the heating, and that is electrical work. We carry both trades, so it is one visit and one firm.
When the heating stops listening
A thermostat is easy to forget about until the heating ignores it.
The same boiler page lists the faults that look like a dead boiler and are not, and one of them is a thermostat that has quietly stopped talking to it. With a wireless thermostat that conversation is a radio signal between two boxes, so before anyone condemns a boiler we check both ends of it.
One number
Ring 07546 185778 if your heating is not answering its thermostat, or if you want the thermostat in a different room.
