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**rmasonjr** · June 23, 2009, 03:49 PM

The WDTC-20 will require it's own power through the C wire.
I have two of these thermostats - one on a heat pump and one on strip-heat - both with a/c. I had to run a 24v AC power supply for one, but it was easily done.

If you want, I will take a picture of my setup and attach to this post? let me know...

**Cal7** · June 23, 2009, 04:21 PM

That was fast. Yes. Please do. I'm sure I read a post from someone with more then one Thermostat that ran power to one. I bet it was your post I was thinking off where I had read that.

At least now you have confirmed that the missing C wire is not a total loss if I can adapt an adapter. I assume you had to cut the ends off and use the wires in place of the missing stuff in one of the diagrams.

My wiring should be simple compared to yours since I don't have cooling or heatpumps to deal with.

But yes, please post the pics, I'd like to see them.

**rmasonjr** · June 23, 2009, 08:38 PM

Originally posted by Cal7 View Post

That was fast. Yes. Please do. I'm sure I read a post from someone with more then one Thermostat that ran power to one. I bet it was your post I was thinking off where I had read that.

At least now you have confirmed that the missing C wire is not a total loss if I can adapt an adapter. I assume you had to cut the ends off and use the wires in place of the missing stuff in one of the diagrams.

My wiring should be simple compared to yours since I don't have cooling or heatpumps to deal with.

But yes, please post the pics, I'd like to see them.

See attached - I circled the connections for the 24v AC connection.
Note that I do have cooling on both my central air units - both have a/c.

Here is the 24v AC converter I used:
http://www.allelectronics.com/index....uery=ACTX-2415

Let me know if you need any additional info.

Attached Files

**Cal7** · June 24, 2009, 02:28 PM

OK. Let me see if I understand what you did.

That adapter has 3 wires from it. 24v, ground, com according to the web page linked.

you circled C and RH. but RH looks likes its got 2 wires going to it.
is the 24v wire from the adapter going to C? I assume Com is RH. It the ground going somewhere? Whats the other wire in RH. did you already have an R wire and thats the other one in RH?

C is obviously always hot and powers the thermostat itself. is RH always hot as well? the manual says its Power for Heat. so are there 2 separate Hot wires needed? It says not to short them together so I'm assuming we need 2 separate hots and therefor the need for the adapter.

If I'm understanding this correctly my wires R W G (as described in the first post) are

my R = RH (hot one)
my W = W (hot touched to this turns furnace on)
my G = G (hot touched to this turns fan on)
- the fan also runs without G being touched if furnace is running.

and I don't have a C

Therefor I need the adapter and will do what you did.

- run the 24v wire from adapter to C
- run the other wires from the adapter "comm and ground" to RH??? or elsewhere? ( I'm kinda wondering if that ground was not used? )
- run my R to RH
- run my W to W
- run my G to G

I also see lots of 24vac plugs that just have 2 wires out and are missing the ground. Did you use the ground?

Further I'm guessing you used from the manual "4 Wire Heat/Cool + C"
where I'm going to use "3 Wire Heat + C" as I don't have the cool part.
(Jumper 3 on)

Does all this sound right? Or am I way off?

**rmasonjr** · June 24, 2009, 02:44 PM

See replies inline...

Originally posted by Cal7 View Post

OK. Let me see if I understand what you did.

That adapter has 3 wires from it. 24v, ground, com according to the web page linked.

you circled C and RH. but RH looks likes its got 2 wires going to it.
is the 24v wire from the adapter going to C? I assume Com is RH. It the ground going somewhere? Whats the other wire in RH. did you already have an R wire and thats the other one in RH?

Yes - Rh has 2 red wires. One is from the 24v AC adapter and the other is an existing thermostat wire. Ground from the 24vAC is not used.

C is obviously always hot and powers the thermostat itself. is RH always hot as well? the manual says its Power for Heat. so are there 2 separate Hot wires needed? It says not to short them together so I'm assuming we need 2 separate hots and therefor the need for the adapter.

Rh I think would only be hot when heat is called-for. I cant say for 100% certain. Wayne-Dalton support indicated that I could have used either the yellow or the Red for Rh - since it is A/C, there is no polarity. That was their email response.

If I'm understanding this correctly my wires R W G (as described in the first post) are

my R = RH (hot one)
my W = W (hot touched to this turns furnace on)
my G = G (hot touched to this turns fan on)
- the fan also runs without G being touched if furnace is running.

and I don't have a C

Therefor I need the adapter and will do what you did.

- run the 24v wire from adapter to C
- run the other wires from the adapter "comm and ground" to RH??? or elsewhere? ( I'm kinda wondering if that ground was not used? )
- run my R to RH
- run my W to W
- run my G to G

Correct, except for the "ground" - you just wont use the ground from the 24v AC transformer.

I also see lots of 24vac plugs that just have 2 wires out and are missing the ground. Did you use the ground?

No ground

Further I'm guessing you used from the manual "4 Wire Heat/Cool + C"
where I'm going to use "3 Wire Heat + C" as I don't have the cool part.
(Jumper 3 on)

Does all this sound right? Or am I way off?

I think you are on the right track

**Cal7** · June 24, 2009, 04:28 PM

Thanks. I'll order it and a few other things I want for this round of installs and see how it goes. Hopefully it comes by late next week and I'll get to try it out the week after that.

Thanks for your help. I'll report back once I try it out.

**ekuykendall** · June 24, 2009, 10:27 PM

Cal,

My old electronic Tstat didn't have a C wire either (dang thing ran on batteries - very strange), so I went down and looked at the circuit board on the furnace. Sure enough, the C wire was there (coming off a 24V Xfmr), but didn't go anywhere. So I tied that into an unused wire in the Tstat bundle and voila, I now had a C wire for the WD. Been working like a champ ever since! Moral - check the furnace wiring to make sure you don't already have a power source before adding an additional one that isn't sync'ed to the furnace operation.

**Cal7** · June 25, 2009, 11:07 AM

I suppose that is possible. But I don't have any unused wires. But that is a good thing to check if you can run more wire or have unused ones. Me, I'm not going to try and run a wire down through the wall even if I did find a C wire down on the furnace.

I put the order in last night for the thermostat and a few other things. I even ordered from here now that they will ship USPS and not the rip off that is UPS.

**ekuykendall** · June 25, 2009, 07:28 PM

Cal, not to beat a dead horse, but are you certain you don't have the extra wires at the Tstat? Installers typically either cut the unused wires or tuck them back into the jacket to clean up the bundle at the back of the Tstat. It would be rare to have only the 3 or 4 wires needed by the Tstat, as the installers typically use standard wire bundles between floors b/c they are color-coded and they install by colors, even if only severl wires in the bundle are used (sorta like Cat5). Just a thought to save you some trouble.

**Cal7** · June 26, 2009, 02:21 AM

That makes sense to me.
I had another look. It does not look like there are any cut wires or other wires tucked inside the wall. Its 3 normal wires all inside another wrapping binding the 3 together.

Granted, its a small hole in the wall and there might be more wires back inside. But I'm not sure I want to open the hole up to check.

On a side note. I have a switch mounted above the furnace that's a master power switch for the furnace. I've used it before to stop the furnace when the pilot had blown out. Looks like it cuts all power to the 3 wires. Same as as the breaker did when I was first testing. I don't know if that means anything to anyone but I found it interesting.

As for me, I'll be out of town until Wed next week. Hopefully my next batch of devices has arrived at work by the time I get back.

Hmm... Lets see If I can take a pic.

Attached Files

**Cal7** · July 19, 2009, 08:31 PM

Update. I've gotten it working.

Sorta.... Or so I had.....

I've run in to a few problems. Both Thermostat and HomeSeer related.

I wired it up with the adapter as follows. The 2 wires from the adapter go to to C and RH. R goes to RH, W to W and G to G.

Thanks to "rmasonjr" I do believe I'm wired correctly but please comment if you think otherwise. I'm not sure I'm jumpered right however. See below.

Before I even get to the HomeSeer questions. Just testing it before doing any zwave stuff seems a little off. When I first turned the power back on the fan started running and would not turn off no matter what. After playing around I discovered that JP5 needs to be taken off so its set to "No Fan". This seems very odd. It even says "Rare" in the manual. I would have thought the default "bottom 4 pins for GAS" would have been the right one for me as my furnace is gas.

With this Jumper off. Sliding the bar to the right does seems to turn on the fan as it should. sliding left back to auto turns it back off.

Bumping the Heat Target up does engage the Furnace. the Gas lights up, the fan starts and it starts putting out heat.

But. Something is wrong. The Fan seems to have a mind of its own. Its come on and off a few times now. I have no idea why. I'm not convinced this jumper should be removed since it does seems to be misbehaving. Perhaps I should have left it on the default Gas setting. I wonder if the fan would have turned off after awhile. But from the testing page It seems it should have started with it in an off state so........ any thoughts?

Now for the HomeSeer weirdness.

I enabled the Tstat plugin. I added it with the z-troller. I think there was a problem as the import from the z-troller. It just keeps refreshing. I never got a mesg saying "1 device added" like I normally do. I finally killed the tab after a few min.

I ended up with what seemed to be two tstats on the tstat status page but only a themostat 18 device on the home page.

Something seemed to be missing so I removed it with the z-troller and re-added it. (so now its number 19). But I can't import. the z-troller still gets stuck trying to re-import number 18. (the number the tstat was the first time round)

Messing around I saved the network settings to the zwave_nodes.txt file it talks about hoping I could edit it and reload it. Well I was able to remove the line with device 18 but it does not help. Reloading it and retrying to do an import still gets stuck on 18.

A side note. The page called "z-wave node who am I" used to have an unknown zwave device 18 on it. After the export/edit/reload it does not. No sign of number 19 at all.

Hopeing to start over. I removed the stat again (now 19) and removed it from Homeseer as well. (no idea if I need to so I thought I would try to start all over) I also hit that restart Interface button in Homeseer at some point in this process to reboot the z-troller.

Now adding the tstat to the z-troller shows its now number 20.

Again. I can't import. Its still getting stuck on 18. Am I screwed? The only thing I can think of is the Erase Interface option. That looks drastic so I thought I'd ask here first.

Anything else I can do to get past the number 18 that does not exist.

Summery.

Tstat not directly related to HomeSeer.
1. Am I wired right. Jumpered right?

Homeseer z-troller issue.
2. Just how bad is that?

**kaldoon** · July 20, 2009, 07:05 AM

Did you try Restarting your Z-Troller - Setup - Interfaces - Manage - Restart Interface or un-plugging the power from the Z-Troller and pulling the batteries and waiting 30 seconds?

**Cal7** · July 20, 2009, 04:06 PM

Yes. I had done the "Restart Interface" but I never pulled the batteries from the z-troller.

But that made me think. Would that not be the same as erasing the memory. So I went ahead and did that. Then reloaded from my "zwave_nodes.txt" file. I seem to be back in control. doing an import says 0 devices imported where before that was getting stuck on a non existent number 18.

I tried to readd the tstat again and the z-troller gave it number 20. both 18 and 19 are gone. I would have thought resetting the z-troller memory would have put it back to counting from 17. The last entry in the zwave notes file. Perhaps there is more info stored somewhere else. Or maybe I should have pulled the batteries after all.

Yet again it would not give me a "1 device added mesg" It just kept reloading the page.

But its again on my status page. and it seems to be reporting the current temp.

When I click on the button added by the plugin (button zwave themostat status) It looks like I have 3 tstats. This can't be right. Last time round I had 2 on this page. I would think I should only have 1. They all report the same temp.

the middle one says "Last Command Successful" under it. The other two

say "Error sending fan mode command (D), return was ERROR ID: 20"

I wonder If I should start over again. But try it without the thermostat plugin enabled. then enable it afterwards. Perhaps this fan error is related to the jumpers I talked about in the last post.

... now all 3 have that above error. I see the log is full of errors too.

sigh. good thing I'm doing this in the summer and not winter when I need this to actually work.

**Cal7** · July 21, 2009, 09:20 PM

another update.

I never did anything but the Thermostat status page now only has 1 device instead of 3. This is like I'd had expected. I may have rebooted that computer when I was messing with Beyond TV. Its the same box. But I'm sure I rebooted it a couple times when I was writing the last note.

A search shows that several people have this fan error.

Staus Error: Error sending fan mode command (D<2>)

This shows up every 10 min in my log. I understand that this Fan can't be controlled via homeseer with this tstat. I knew that when I bought it. So is Homeseer somehow not aware of that and hence my errors? If so, How do I get rid of the error. I don't see any soln other then removing some sort of script (that I don't have) or resetting the z-troller interface (done, no help).

Is this normal. Do other peoples WDTC-20 do this?

The tstat currently says 27.0 on its face. HS reports 270? Hmm. Nice decimal bug. Setpoint has the same bug. OK. that I can deal with.

But

What is this Min/Max of 40/90. 40C would be burning hot. I told it I'm using C but I can't adjust these numbers. And as such I can't do events as I have need a much lower range to work with.

I see it does not report back to HS when things are changed. Polling only. I wish I had known that before I bought it.

Arg. I Just discovered another issue. I can set the setpoint on the tstat itself and HS will pick it up on the next poll. But I can't set the setpoint from Homeseer. No mater what I try to set it to, the tstat then gets set to 2C the next time it gets polled. WTF.

So as far as control goes. Whats the point. This tstat seems useless. I'm assuming this is NOT normal and I have major problems.

I've only had a couple small problems with the rest of the zwave network setup. I've had nothing but problems with the tstat.

Announcement

Need Wiring help with WDTC-20 - Z-Wave Thermostat (Wayne-Dalton)

Need Wiring help with WDTC-20 - Z-Wave Thermostat (Wayne-Dalton)

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