My heat was uncontrolable in my living room so the maintainence man replaced the thermostat with a new one. The new unit clicks both for on and off but there is no power to the baseboard heaters. As this housing complex is mindfully short of people who understand the basics I was wondering if anyone could walk me through the steps of testing the new unit myself. I understand basic electricity as I worked on radar systems in the navy. The problem is making the maintainence understand it takes more than a few seconds for the heaters to power up as it were. Besides the basic test for power on the other side are there any other things I can check on the thermostat itself??

 

What type of thermostat is it? A low voltage control or a line voltage switch? I kind of assume its line voltage but we need to know for sure.

 

Is this a wall mounted thermostat or a unit mounted thermostat? All a line voltage thermostat does is make and break the wires depending on the thermostat setting. How many wires are on the thermostat? If you have a wall mounted thermostat, remove the wiring cover on the heater. Check to see what voltage the heater is supposed to be on the nameplate. If it is a 240 volt heater, and you have a two wire (plus ground) cable entering the heater, you should get a reading of 240 volts (nominal) across the two insulated conductors when you turn the thermostat up above the room temperature. If you are geting the proper voltage, then you have a problem at the heater itself. When you turn it down, you should lose the voltage. Be careful though, if there is a single pole thermostat controlling the unit you will have 120 volts on one leg all the time (check each leg to ground with thermostat off to check). If you provide a little more information about the wiring details I'm sure we can help.

 

The thermostat in question is UL Listed as model 859M Room Thermostat and is wall mounted. There are two lines on each side of the unit and since the heat was working full blast with the old unit I came to the logical conclusion that the new thermostat was defective. As for testing the other side I am not that sure of myself to do this with the power on(240V) but I really appreciate the advice. Thankyou very much.

 

If you're feeling brave, cut the breaker off, remove the wire nuts from the two connections in the heater to expose the wire, turn power back on and touch each lead with your tester probes with meter set on voltage. Checking each wire to ground should read 120 volts. Turn power off, replace wire nuts and wiring cover. Turn breaker back on. It could very well be that when your maintenance man pushed the thermostat into the box one of his splices could have come loose. In such case, you would have 120 volts on one of the legs but not the other which would render your heater useless.

You could always cut the power off and pull the thermostat out of the wall and inspect his connections if you don't have a tester. I would be willing to bet your problem is with one of those 4 splices - like I said, all it takes is for one of the 4 to be bad.

 

I appreciate the help. WIll check the connections. Thanks again. Rick

 

THANKYOU for your replies. I have heat!! You were right about that one wire coming loose messing up the whole process. Many thanks for your help and wisdom. It is greatly appreciated. Rick

 

Excellent. Most maintenance men that I've known are glorified plumbers. They only know enough electrical and HVAC to be dangerous, but they sure can unclog a toilet!