Testing an HVAC Thermostat

 Uh, in the event that you have your settings on your thermostat, uh, the way you want them, whether it's heat, ac, whether the fan is on auto or off, and you're not getting the functions to happen and you don't know whether or not the thermostat is working properly, this is a great way to test it. So I have my magnetic leads here, so if I plug, or if I push this little magnetic side.

Into the terminal here where the red wire is. 'cause that's my 24 volts and I take the other end of this and I apply it to any of the other, uh, components on here. It should click those to come on. So my green wire is the fan motor, so let's go. Fan motor. Should take a second for the relay to kick on because all I'm doing is sending power.

From the red wire straight to the green wire, I'm bypassing all of this and boom, there it went. So my relay heated up coil kicked in, caused my fan to come on. So if I take this off now, I've cut the power. That little coil, uh, or, or thermo disc is gonna cool down, but say I want to check outside. I want to see if my power's going outside to the condensing unit.

I'll take this little end and I'll put it on the yellow wire. Boom, there it goes. All I'm doing is bypassing the thermostat, telling it what to do, and I am manually telling it what to do if at any point. My thermostat and under normal operating procedure does not cause this to happen. I can test the thermostat by jumping wires, and as long as it's doing what I'm asking it to do, when I place these wires, you know, or I'm sorry if I'm placing these leads and everything is coming on, so I know I have power, but if the thermostat is not sending power, then you know you have a bad thermostat.

So let's go one more. Let's do. Let's do electric heat. Where are you? Let's do heat.

Sorry, I was, might have been holding my phone wrong, but probably a bad example here because we need the sequencer to heat up and if you guys know anything about how to read a sequencer, you can see those numbers on there. It's basically telling you that the heat is gonna take from 30 seconds to 90 seconds, and the cool off period is from one second to 30 seconds.

So anywhere from 30 seconds to a minute and a half is how long this takes to heat up. In order for this peg here to make contact, to kick, to kick on my heat strips. So I did put it over there. Um, but now we're gonna have to sit here and wait. Huh? How about that? I'm brilliant. Bingo. It worked. Ha. I love it when stuff works.

All right, so now we'll turn off our heat strips, or I just disconnected it. Uh, we're gonna check our reversing valve, which is actually right here next to the red wire. Boom. Power. So that is a quick and effective way to test a thermostat. These magnetic leads are great. I love them. Uh, you can also get leads with alligator clips if you would like those.

Um, 'cause you can, you can apply this anywhere, right? So if my red wire is power, I can put it right here. For my green. Uh, but alligator clips are extremely useful as well. Uh, you can take them with you throughout the apartment. Um, clip on the thermostat wires no matter where they are, and be able to jump this power.

It's a great, great tool for diagnosing electrical issues on your 24 volt cycle. Thank you. Catch you on the next one.