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Topic: Hall thermostat gone blank and ticking like a timebomb  (Read 6007 times)

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Hall thermostat gone blank and ticking like a timebomb
« on: September 25, 2017, 05:48:13 PM »
We have a central boiler that does heat and hot water. I've not set it to do heat, just hot water, as it's not been chilly enough to fire it up. So about an hour ago we hear this constant ticking, like an alarm clock. Finally traced it to the programmable thermostat on the wall in the hall. The screen is dead, and it's ticking. The only instructions we have for the thing have nothing about this.  We put in a call to the landlord's, who are sending someone out tomorrow at 8:00am. (If we didn't have heat and wanted it, they'd have sent someone tonight.)

I can hear the ticking no matter where in the house I go.  It's going to be a long night.  Anyone have any experience with these things? Drayton Digistat 3.


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Re: Hall thermostat gone blank and ticking like a timebomb
« Reply #1 on: September 25, 2017, 05:54:49 PM »
Earplugs!  :)


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Re: Hall thermostat gone blank and ticking like a timebomb
« Reply #2 on: September 25, 2017, 10:40:05 PM »
No suggestions, but I can offer sympathy.

I lived in Iowa for a while and a lot of rented houses are split into two apartments. I was living upstairs and had my own separate exterior entrance with my own private stairs. The ground floor had the usual house entrance. We didn't share any interior part of the house.

I was home over Christmas and all the downstairs renters were gone for the holiday.

Their fire alarm beeped, signalling a low battery, for the whole two weeks they were gone.

I rang the landlord but he said unless it was an emergency, they couldn't go in the property, so I just had to suffer through it. Of course, the fire alarm sounded like it was right in the middle of the house and their ceiling was my floor, so I could hear it from the bedroom, living room... everywhere. Even worse, there was just enough time between beeps to make you think that maybe it had stopped. Then it'd beep again, laughing at you.

I feel for you, Nan. Turn on some quiet music or a podcast to drown out the beeping until it's fixed.
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Re: Hall thermostat gone blank and ticking like a timebomb
« Reply #3 on: September 25, 2017, 11:29:35 PM »
We have a central boiler that does heat and hot water. I've not set it to do heat, just hot water, as it's not been chilly enough to fire it up. So about an hour ago we hear this constant ticking, like an alarm clock. Finally traced it to the programmable thermostat on the wall in the hall. The screen is dead, and it's ticking. The only instructions we have for the thing have nothing about this.  We put in a call to the landlord's, who are sending someone out tomorrow at 8:00am. (If we didn't have heat and wanted it, they'd have sent someone tonight.)

I can hear the ticking no matter where in the house I go.  It's going to be a long night.  Anyone have any experience with these things? Drayton Digistat 3.
Have you tried restarting it?

Turn the boiler off at the switch and then while holding down both buttons on the receiver switch the boiler back on.

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Re: Hall thermostat gone blank and ticking like a timebomb
« Reply #4 on: September 26, 2017, 08:03:42 AM »
Is the tempo consistent? Or is it getting faster and faster,  like it is building up to something?
I just hope that more people will ignore the fatalism of the argument that we are beyond repair. We are not beyond repair. We are never beyond repair. - AOC


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Re: Hall thermostat gone blank and ticking like a timebomb
« Reply #5 on: September 26, 2017, 08:33:10 AM »
Hahaha, like a kaboom?  No, thankfully, it was just clicking several times a second, loudly and steadily. Nothing on the control panel is working, and the display is dead.  ???

So we retreated to the back of the house and this morning the ticking is still going on, just much more quietly - you need to be standing next to it to hear it now.  The repair guy is due out any time now.... which will be good. 

I did find a four-sheet instructions guide in the closet, but it only details how to set the temperatures (apparently we have the option to set up to 21 different temperatures - 3 per day x 7 days).  I'm going to ask the guy to set it at the factory defaults, which seem to be reasonable, except that they have it getting too warm on Saturdays and Sundays for us. I assume there will be a way to manually change that....

Anyway, it didn't explode. We still have hot water for dishes and bathing, and it's not chilly enough to need the heat yet. (It was 65F in the kitchen this morning when I went out to make my morning coffee - lovely.)

.... And, as I was finishing that up, the repair guy came. Color me embarrassed, but the thing has batteries. And they were deadski. He replaced them and we're back to no ticking and a display.  ::)  I'd have needed a teeny screwdriver to get in to change them anyway... guy says the batteries he put in are "industrial" and should last "a lot longer than what was in there."  However long that might be.
« Last Edit: September 26, 2017, 08:34:33 AM by Nan D. »


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Re: Hall thermostat gone blank and ticking like a timebomb
« Reply #6 on: September 26, 2017, 08:53:51 AM »
No suggestions, but I can offer sympathy.

I lived in Iowa for a while and a lot of rented houses are split into two apartments. I was living upstairs and had my own separate exterior entrance with my own private stairs. The ground floor had the usual house entrance. We didn't share any interior part of the house.

I was home over Christmas and all the downstairs renters were gone for the holiday.

Their fire alarm beeped, signalling a low battery, for the whole two weeks they were gone.

I rang the landlord but he said unless it was an emergency, they couldn't go in the property, so I just had to suffer through it. Of course, the fire alarm sounded like it was right in the middle of the house and their ceiling was my floor, so I could hear it from the bedroom, living room... everywhere. Even worse, there was just enough time between beeps to make you think that maybe it had stopped. Then it'd beep again, laughing at you.

I feel for you, Nan. Turn on some quiet music or a podcast to drown out the beeping until it's fixed.

That would be absolute torture.  I know the exact chirp you are talking about too!


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Re: Hall thermostat gone blank and ticking like a timebomb
« Reply #7 on: September 26, 2017, 08:54:09 AM »
No suggestions, but I can offer sympathy.

I lived in Iowa for a while and a lot of rented houses are split into two apartments. I was living upstairs and had my own separate exterior entrance with my own private stairs. The ground floor had the usual house entrance. We didn't share any interior part of the house.

I was home over Christmas and all the downstairs renters were gone for the holiday.

Their fire alarm beeped, signalling a low battery, for the whole two weeks they were gone.

I rang the landlord but he said unless it was an emergency, they couldn't go in the property, so I just had to suffer through it. Of course, the fire alarm sounded like it was right in the middle of the house and their ceiling was my floor, so I could hear it from the bedroom, living room... everywhere. Even worse, there was just enough time between beeps to make you think that maybe it had stopped. Then it'd beep again, laughing at you.

I feel for you, Nan. Turn on some quiet music or a podcast to drown out the beeping until it's fixed.

Oh, you poor thing!  That's a LOT worse than ticking. That beeping... the last place we lived we had older wiring. And the smoke detectors  were wired in. For some reason that is well beyond me to understand, every year in the autumn and then again in the spring, at about the same dates each year, the damned things would start chirping, and only at 3:30 - 4:00 in the morning. We'd call housing repair, they'd come out and check and "reset" them, and then leave. And then the chirping or full-on alarm would happen as we watched their tail lights disappear down the street. So we'd have to call them back.  The only way to turn it off was to turn all the power off to the apartment at the main breaker....  Seriously, every year for six years and they could never sort out what was doing it. The new resident should get to hear it in about a month....

There have been studies that show young children sleep through the darned things anyway.


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Re: Hall thermostat gone blank and ticking like a timebomb
« Reply #8 on: September 26, 2017, 09:39:02 AM »
TravelingFrog, that just sounds like hell on earth!!   :o
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Re: Hall thermostat gone blank and ticking like a timebomb
« Reply #9 on: September 26, 2017, 11:31:48 AM »
It was sooooo annoying.

I'm hindsight, I wonder if I'd called the fire department telling them the alarm was going off (a version of the truth) but no one was home, if they would have come by and maybe replaced the battery. Probably broken the door down in the process, but my problem would have been solved.  ;)

Story time!

I lived in a remote village of about 60 people and we were our own fire department so we had all the fire alarms set as sensitive as they would go.

When the weather would be dry (enough to create some dust) and then it would rain, the rain would displace the dust and set off the alarms. The whole village would respond with our usual fire procedure, even though we knew it was probably the dust setting off the alarm, just in case it was an actual fire.

The sensitive alarms also meant they'd go off from someone cooking/burning food. One guy liked to smoke salmon and he set off the alarm regularly. ::) We'd tell him if the alarm went off from him smoking salmon, he'd have to share.

We were also our own hydro power plant team and had a rota for which duo would sleep with the power outage alarm and respond to outages. One person would stay in the village with a radio and the other would head out to the small hydro plant and troubleshoot. I remember one Easter morning when i was on duty and it went off several times overnight. We could not for the life of us get it restarted so at 4am we had to wake up the village electrician.

We also were responsible for stoking the fire that heated all the houses. When it was really cold, it would need stoking every hour or two. Once when I was on duty in the dead of winter, I slept through my alarm and (as a 17 year old) had to get a fire going in the middle of a cold, snowy night so the other villagers didn't wake up cold. It was stressful to say the least.
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Re: Hall thermostat gone blank and ticking like a timebomb
« Reply #10 on: September 26, 2017, 11:40:10 AM »
Wow!  :o


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Hall thermostat gone blank and ticking like a timebomb
« Reply #11 on: September 26, 2017, 01:01:19 PM »
Thanks for that story!

Where was it? Alaska?

« Last Edit: September 26, 2017, 01:02:56 PM by jimbocz »


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Re: Hall thermostat gone blank and ticking like a timebomb
« Reply #12 on: September 26, 2017, 01:04:11 PM »
This sounds like a fun place to live.  I like remote communities!
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Re: Hall thermostat gone blank and ticking like a timebomb
« Reply #13 on: September 26, 2017, 01:06:28 PM »

guy says the batteries he put in are "industrial" and should last "a lot longer than what was in there." 
Did he offer to change the headlight fluid in your car as well?


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Re: Hall thermostat gone blank and ticking like a timebomb
« Reply #14 on: September 26, 2017, 01:46:59 PM »
That was in a remote village in the Cascade Mountains in Washington state. It was awesome.
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