DIY a Stay at Home Dad can do: A new Thermostat

Dads, moms and babies need to stay cool, keep warm or keep those HVAC bills under control.  A nice programmable digital controller for your HVAC system can regulate temperatures day to day, as well as, specific times.   Successfully programming your system can save you cash, which dads can then use for other important things like beer, pizza, video games or comic books.

When our HVAC system was inspected recently the technician told me that the thermostat was not working correctly.  As this was the second time I had been told this, I knew that he was telling the truth.  By nature, I don’t trust people selling me stuff, especially when its guy stuff that I feel like I should know. 

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve never worked around heating or air conditioning, but my DNA just tells me that I should know how they work.  Apparently that DNA strand is trapped in an amber pocket somewhere, because I’m clueless about heating or air conditioning work. 

So this guy is telling me that the thermostat is broken and a new one that costs $188 needs to be installed.  Baby Mojo is on the floor crying, then happy, then crying and the dog is barking because the baby is acting strangely.  After a quick phone call with the wife, who assured me that it was the right thing to do, I authorized the technician to install the new programmable controller.

“Before you install it though, let me watch what you do, so I can take it off again and remove the old wallpaper”, I said to him.   I turned around to get the pet hair out of the baby’s mouth, change his diaper and the technician was already done with the work.    With my man card now full revoked I grabbed the needle with the final shot of estrogen needed to complete my emasculation. 

“Wait, I wanted to see what you did”, I said in my deepest manliest voice.  He then told me that it was super easy, took the unit off, showed me the wires, put it back on and pointed to where it was in the instruction manual.

The next day I gathered the remains on my manhood and headed to a local home improvement store where I saw mid line programmable thermostats for $60.  The instruction manual is easy to understand, the main power doesn’t even need to be disconnected and it really is just four colored coded wires. 

My wife said to me, after a much needed syringe full of testosterone, ‘now you know how to do the next one sweetie’.

The Punch Line

Real *men replace their own programmable thermostats.    Once you finish this project, which should take 10 minutes maximum, go watch G4, Spike or Cops.

As a stay at home dad I miss having the spare time to fix things.  Even though the child is my full time job, things still break or need a fix in the house.  Sometimes the repair will be something that I easily could’ve completed and other times it’s a repair that I simply should’ve paid to have it done.  Regardless, I’ll write it up here in hopes that you may be able to gauge what you can do and when you need to call in for help.  The series is called, DIY a Stay at Home Dad Can Do, but in some cases, you shouldn’t, because of difficulty, time involved or money.  All dads aren’t equal.   If you’re a construction wiz, then bypass this series and go straight to the fart jokes, which should be in the next column.     

*Ladies, you can do this too.  I had to put the phrase ‘real men’ in The Punch Line to encourage time stressed stay at home dads that they have the time to do it.