My furnace is running solely off of thermostat batteries?

Question

Hi so I have Time Warner's Intelligent Home in my house. So the security system and thermostat are through them. When they installed it they put in a new thermostat that runs off of 4 AA batteries.

Basically, we noticed all of a sudden (about a month after having the system installed) that our batteries were dying every 1-2 weeks. So we would replace them every time and this continued from November or so until today. We had an employee of Time Warner come in and he told us:

The batteries are purely for backup. He told us they had been dying so quickly because our FURNACE was running entirely off of the 4 batteries in the thermostat.

So what could the issue be here? He said he didn't know what was wrong so we should get an HVAC specialist in to look at it but I wanted to see if anyone had experienced this before. Thank you.

? · Accepted Answer

He mistakenly said (or you misunderstood) that the FURNACE is running solely off of the thermostat batteries.  What he meant (or should have said) was that the THERMOSTAT is running solely off the thermostat batteries, instead of off of the furnace transformer.  It's a 24 volt AC low voltage system for furnace control.  The thermostat is probably miswired.

badger123ca · Answer

A furnace is not going to run off batteries.  You need to get someone that knows what they're talking about in to look at the issue.

? · Answer

Well they probably didn't connect a common wire from the furnace or didn't connect the wires properly on the sub base. The Warner rep would not do anything that the contractor is responsible for and also will not say too much as to make the contractor look bad. It should be an easy fix for the contractor though.

? · Answer

1

Anonymous · Answer

is that TW employee someone who knows about HVAC ?? you may need to contact a company that does HVAC work and have them look at it

Dawn M · Answer

yes

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My furnace is running solely off of thermostat batteries?

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