Geekery Installs Modifications RV Tech
MOD: Smart Thermostats in an RV? YES!
Original Thermostat
If you’re like me, you tend to sleep with the temperature quite a bit colder than your daytime setting. My specific setpoints are:
76 °F for the day time, and 68 °F at night for the summer.
71 °F for the day time, and 64 °F at night for the winter.
While it’s a little thing, it’s becomes tedious to do these settings changes every evening / morning, especially knowing there are so many programmable and/or Smart thermostats on the market for the household climate control systems.
However, the RV world is woefully lacking of any type of programmability on the thermostats. Worse yet, RV AC/Heatpumps have some things stacked against them when looking for aftermarket kit:
- RV AC/Heatpumps made the weird choice to use 12 Vdc control panels (instead of 24vac) — as if you could run them without 120 Vac power?
- RVs can often have more ‘heat’ options than our sticks & bricks brethren.
- RVs also tend to have two speed fans in our AC/Heatpumps
This all combines to make replacing an RV thermostat with anything other than the OEM unit a daunting task.