Gas fireplace, add neutral wire for Switch?

Power & Lighting
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I have a Natural Gas fireplace and my intention was to replace the existing “light” switch with a Wyze Switch. My home was built in 2021.

One, it is cool to be able to say, “Alexa, turn on the fireplace”, or “Go-Go Gadget Fireplace”.

Two, I wanted to set up an automation that when the fireplace is on, it will trigger the furnace blower, via the Wzye Thermostat, to also turn on. When we turn on the fireplace, we always forget to turn on the blower to circulate the air, or forget to turn it off. Otherwise the upstairs gets really cold when the fireplace is off, since the Thermostat is in the hallway near the fireplace, on the main floor….

Since power is ran to the fireplace, and a light switch is attached to that, there is no Neutral wire in the box… I think I could maybe feed a wire up to the box, does anyone else have experience with this? Before I attempt this, I am wondering if it will still work? Could I pull through another strand of wire, that has 4 wires?

Based on the picture below, if the whole reason for a Neutral wire is to power the Wyze Switch, could I run a cable with Red, Black, Wire and Green? Then the Red could be Line, Black can be Load, Green will stay ground, and White would turn into Neutral, but I could try to tie it into the wiring by the fireplace unit? My concern would be the difference in wire gauges…. The fireplace has 14-2 Romex ran to it. In the picture below, it looks like 16… Likely a proprietary(or kit) switch and wire for the fireplace? Which, if I ran 14-2 romex up to the box, Maybe I could connect the white to the main Neutral at the fireplace base, and the Wyze Switch can handle that, so I don’t have to twist different sizes together?

Side note, I feel very comfortable working on electric, but I don’t want to do a DIY special and burn my house down! haha

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Are you certain that this switch is connected to household current? That doesn’t comport with my understanding of how these things work, though I haven’t actually pulled the switch for my gas fireplace and tested the wiring myself. If I did, then I imagine I’m not going to be measuring anywhere near 120 V AC. (I don’t mind testing if that helps with your question, as it could satisfy my own curiosity.)

If the wiring in your photo doesn’t look like the wiring you see connecting other switches in boxes in your house, then I think that provides an important clue that this is a different kind of entity and routing a different kind of power. The wires in the photo appear to be a much smaller gauge than I would expect for household current, and I have strong doubts that they would meet code for that application. Given that, I also have doubts that there would be sufficient current into this box to even power a Wyze Switch.

I see where you’re going with your goal, and I’m not opposed to the convenience. Just thinking through this reminds me of how Google Home/Google Assistant don’t allow certain kinds of voice commands to be used with certain kinds of devices because they’ve tried to build in protections to keep people from accidentally burning their homes down or unintentionally creating other disasters, so I think there’s reason to be cautious when pursuing something like this.

Having said all that, I wonder if one of the Shelly switches (or something similar) would be a better solution for this kind of use case. That’s probably what I’d be exploring if I really wanted to pursue something like this.

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You make a good point! I just tested the wiring to the current switch and it reads 5.9v when off, and 0.0v when on. And i’m on ACV 200 setting, not 750 setting… Regardless if the fireplace is still clicking to start the fire, or if the fire is going and the clicking has stopped.

The smaller gauge wiring and the red, white, green wiring colors was a clue!

I think the only way that could make this work is if I left the current switch always on, then added the Wyze Switch before the fireplace, which has romex 14-2 going to it. But, that seems like a pain… I’ll wait and use it when I add an electric fireplace to the bedroom.

Happen to know any creative ways to activate the furnace blower, when the fireplace is going? Wyze has a “secondary” thermostat, right? Maybe I could create an automation if the upstairs is ever cooler than the main floor thermostat, turn on the blower? There is zero other time when that could happen, it is always warmer upstairs, than downstairs!!

I looked at the Shelly switches, but I didn’t think I could automate the furnace blower or not with the Wyze Thermostat….

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I don’t understand what you’re asking here, and I don’t have any hands-on experience with Wyze Thermostat.

Perhaps not all within one single smart home ecosystem, but if you’re already using Wyze and Amazon Alexa, then you’re not currently confining yourself to one system. Your problem made me curious, so I did some reading about using a Shelly relay to turn a gas fireplace on and off, and I also found a comment on StackExchange that resonated.

Is this something you’re already controlling with Wyze Thermostat? Like I said, I don’t have any direct experience with Wyze Thermostat, so I don’t know what capabilities it has or if you can use Wyze Automations to trigger a blower via the Thermostat. If you can do that, then it seems like it might be possible to install a Shelly relay to control your gas valve and then bridge that to Wyze via Home Assistant so that whenever the Shelly switch turns on the Thermostat is triggered to turn on the blower. I don’t think this is something you’re going to be able to do entirely with existing Wyze devices, though.

What other sources have you consulted for something like this? If you’ve already looked at the Shelly switches, then did you visit their community forum? I’d be inclined to poke around in there for ideas, because this seems like the kind of thing other users have already done.

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Ope, the “secondary” thermostat that I was thinking of is the Wyze Room Sensor. It looks like it takes the average temp of the house, but I can’t select one sensor to activate the blower. I’ll look into that more.

Thank you for the links! I looked into options with switches and got overwhelmed with the amount of info available… LOL I’m looking into those links right now!!

When I looked at automations, I saw the wyze thermostat as an option, but i’m not 100% on the extent of the options. But that is a great idea to bridge them together, I had not thought of that, at all!! I looked at the Shelly Switches, but stopped quickly, at they were mostly offering Smart Switches, and I was looking more towards “simple/analog” switches, that I could connect to the Wyze Switch.

I’ll have to look more into what the Wyze cameras can see with AI, but I wonder if I point an old Wyze camera at the fireplace, if I could use that as a trigger? Similar to people, animals, vehicles, etc.

I have a tendency to over complicate stuff, then review all the options, and find the most simple options at the end. The most simple option isn’t usually the best one, its more of a hybrid of a few of them…

Again, I really appreciate your feedback and the links that you shared!

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I’ve read a little about the Wyze Room Sensor but don’t know a whole lot about it. Since I don’t have the Wyze Thermostat, I haven’t really explored those much.

There’s definitely a lot of information available for doing all kinds of things with automation, and that has made me more curious over time about Home Assistant, but I haven’t yet taken the plunge. If/when Wyze supports official integration with Home Assistant (something users have been pushing them to do for a while), then I’ll likely be much more interested.

I wouldn’t expect pointing a camera at the fireplace to be very useful for something like this unless you were able to really tune a detection zone and motion sensitivity to reliably capture pixel changes from flames. Even with lighting changes in a given room throughout the day, that would probably trigger any automations you try to set up that way, because I don’t think there’s any way to currently tell Wyze’s system to do something when a camera specifically sees fire.

One thought that occurred to me that might be doable since you mentioned Alexa in your initial post is using an Echo device to initiate a trigger for your Wyze Thermostat, and you wouldn’t have to futz with any wiring at all. My 5th Gen Echo Dot has a thermometer, which is pretty cool because I have an Echo Pop in another part of the house and can ask Alexa what the temperature is in the room where the Dot is. I haven’t actually tried this, but it looks like it’s possible to create a Routine in the Alexa app that’s initiated when the Dot senses a certain temperature. If you have an Echo device with a thermometer that you could place near your fireplace, then you might be able to set something up so that after you flick the switch and get your fireplace going, your Echo’s thermometer kicks off a Routine that can be used to turn on the blower. I’d maybe look into doing something like that—or at least trying it, even if it doesn’t become a permanent solution—because that seems like a potentially easier way to accomplish at least one of your goals here.

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