Heating up the place

Today I had to stay at home in the morning, there was a problem with the central heating in my apartment and I had to wait for the repair guy to come and fix it.

Nothing particularly noteworthy about it. Until I started asking him some questions about the system, that is.

You see, I have a thermostat control for the thing but it is located on the wrong place entirely (I won’t go into that now, trust me on this one) and I also wanted to fit it with a time-control mechanism. You know, the kind where you can program it to turn on at a certain time and turn off at another time and so on.

So what’s so remarkable about this you may ask? And you do have a point, it doesn’t look interesting. And neither was his answer which was basically that I had to get an electrical contractor to do it as it was not something the heating company does as it basically amounts to closing a circuit when you want the heater on and opening it when you want it off. He also said that I can just replace my current thermostat with one which not only does the… er… thermostat thingie, but also has a timer built in for programming. He even told me where to get one, but I wasn’t really listening at this point.

No, I wasn’t listening at all. And that’s because I was mulling over the fact that the whole heater control circuit revolves around opening or closing a simple one line circuit. One wire-end at one side and another wire-end at the other side… Connect them if you want the heater on, disconnect them if you want the heater off… Can you say X10??

Must… resist… temptation… to… wire… up… the… whole… house!