Heater and Thermostat Wiring, Part 1 of Several....

I'm ready to start the wiring for the heaters now.   The plan, such as it is, is to mount the thermostat on the door frame, run the wiring down the frame in a wire channel thingy, and hope for the best.

Of course, what I find during this planning phase is that the door frame is in really bad shape and needs to be painted.

Just one more digression before the main act...we seem to have had a lot of these in this project.

You can see the condition of the frame in the picture on the right.  There are a lot of dents and gashes and bad paint.  The PO's must have been c-c-crazy from running into the door jambs so much!

But it's better to fill them and repaint now rather than later.

So I fill the gashes and dents and wait for the filler to dry.

While I wait for the filler - which takes several coats to fill some of the worst spots - to dry, I figgur I can go ahead and do a test wiring-up of the heaters to make sure they work.

I would really hate it if I connected everything up and I had no heat.  That wouldn't be cool (heh heh).

On the left is the wiring diagram for the heaters.  If you can read schematics, you can see that we're going to connect the heaters in parallel.  The total load on the circuit will be almost 18 amps.  I'll have them on a 30 amp circuit so there shouldn't be any concern about overloading the circuit.

I don't have pics of the connecting-of-the-heaters-together-in-parallel, but you can rest assured it went ok.

I have the heater circuit line coming into the room from under the step under the door.  (That part will be clearer in a bit).  We need to run the heater line to the thermostat, then run a line from the thermostat to the point market "Power Supply" in the heater diagram above.  So there will be two lines going up the wall to the thermostat - the "input" from the house breaker box, and the "output" to the heaters.


Being an audio guy, I think of current or circuit flow in terms of "in" and "out," which is easier for me to visualize.  The picture above is the thermostat wired up and laying on the floor...just as a test.  And it works!

I disconnect the thermostat and hold it up to the door frame to measure where it will be mounted.  The thermostat instructions say it needs to be at least five feet above the floor.

Now it's just...I say "just" a matter of mounting it, running the cables through the wire cover and turning it on.  Should be easy, right?  Ha.