I find that a reliable way to warm up on a cool day is to undertake a DIY job involving either water or electricity. There is a certain amount of nervous energy that comes with channelling either of those because there is always the potential for things to go horribly wrong! Today I did both, in the form of fitting a new wireless thermostat to our boiler, so I am feeling nice and toasty inside although I am pleased to report that it all seems to have gone pretty smoothly.

The old thermostat (Honeywell CM-927) was intermittently losing parts of the LCD display. It seemed to be operational but there was too much risk that it would fail completely in the depths of winter. Originally I had planned for our boiler engineer to fit a new thermostat but she suggested that it was well within the competence of careful DIY skills. The CM-927 unit is now obsolete so I picked up a similar Honeywell T3R instead and I decided to do the swap this morning.

I proceeded at a careful pace and it actually all went very smoothly. The main hitches were figuring out which breaker on our consumer unit would isolate the boiler and spotting that whoever put the previous one in wrapped both the boiler control wires in the same brown insulation coating. That wasn’t very helpful, particularly because it matched the brown used for the live mains feed, but I used some electricians tape in different colours to differentiate them before I took everything apart. The new system fired up with no problems and, as promised, automatically paired with the wireless thermostat. I’m hoping there won’t be any further cause to mention boiler thermostats for a good time to come though.