Heat Pump wiring + new humidifier

I feel like I’m in way over my head but I’ve read many helpful posts so maybe someone can give me some suggestions. Two separate questions:

I set up the thermostat with my heat pump. It blows room temp air ALL DAY. It seems really inefficient and I’ve seen other posts mention similar issues. Do I need to change wiring so it kicks on “emergency heat” (is that the same thing as stage 2)?

Also, I’ve had a bypass whole house humidifier installed. Currently the control is in my crawl space but I’d like to connect it to the wyze pannel. Is that something I can do with very little experience or do I need to have a pro come take a look?

Here’s a picture of my current wiring (there are 2 unused wires so maybe they are available for the humidifier?)

Did you ever get this solved?

I picked up two of these last week and it’s been pretty warm here. It’s cold today though, and I’m noticing that the downstairs is really struggling to increase the heat by a single degree. It’s literally been running for almost an hour now, and still hasn’t reached 73 from 72. It’s 50 outside. I have a heat pump as well, and an air blower/furnace in the attic. My wiring is the same as yours. From what I understand, emergency heat does not activate with this wiring. At least I don’t see it ever activating when I go up to my attic and see what the zone controller is doing. The EM heat light is never lit…but I’m having the same issue as you - it’s just blowing room temperature air. This is very frustrating.

Try turning on the air conditioning and tell me what happens.
If the heat pump is running with reversed logic, when a call for heat is made, it can be running the heat pump in cooling mode and the backup heat in heating mode, which generally results in “room temperature” air coming out of the vent (and a very expensive electric bill). There should be a setting in advanced settings called something like swap hot and cold that will fix this.

For your first question, look at the response to the other poster.

For your second question: if you show a picture of the furnace side of the wiring, I can probably show you how to hook up your humidifier.

I just switched it to cooling and turned the temperature down a few degrees. It felt like cool air blowing (which is also what I get when I run the stages test).

Haven’t figured it out but I’ve been very thankful the weather is warming up so i haven’t needed heat as much. Hopefully I can get it figured out by next winter.

@speadie do these pictures help?



Where is the other end of the 2 white cables with the red and white internal wires that come from the humidifier?


It looks like red goes to RC and white goes to C.

Yes, but there are 2 cables. where does the other one go?

@speadie sorry! I didnt even notice the other one. It connects to the humidistat in my crawl space. It’s turned off now because I couldn’t get it to work.

Ok. Can you easily unplug the wires from here?
image
It looks like these are just push connections. First turn off the power to the control board so you don’t damage anything if something shorts out. Then remove the red wire that runs to the humidistat from that connector. Remove the wire nut tying the 2 whites together and connect the white wire that comes from the board to the place that the red wire that came from the humidistat was. Disconnect the red wire that goes to the humidifier from the Rc terminal on the control board and connect it to the brown wire that goes to your wyze thermostat. You should be able to move the white wire from C on the left side to C on the right side for that thermostat hookup if it makes wiring easier.

The end result should be that your humidifier has a white wire that is connected directly to one of the board’s C terminals, and a red wire that is connected to the brown wire that goes to the wyze thermostat, with the humidistat being hooked up to nothing. You should be able to turn the power back on now, after tightening any terminal screws that you loosened and making sure all wires that should be connected, are.

You will need to reset your wyze thermostat and tell it that your “old thermostat” has a HUM wire connected to it along with the other wires that your system has (G, Y, O/B, Rc, C, W) during setup. The HUM wire is the brown wire.

As for your first issue, your zone control is controlling the second stage. Do you have a second thermostat hooked up, or just the wyze?

@speadie thank you! I just did all the wiring in my crawl space. I’m very hopeful. Now I need to reset my wyze thermostat. Is that done by deleting the device and reconnecting? Also, which terminal should the brown humidifier wire connect to in the wyze control panel?

To reset, press down on the button on the thermostat until it asks if you want to reset it, then remove it from the app and re-add it. Wyze’s setup will have you connect the brown wire to *.

@speadie is there any chance that changing the wiring could be causing power issues to my thermostat? I’ve been trying to figure it out on my and the weather has been nice so I haven’t missed my thermostat but now it’s 90°F and I need some AC. Right now the thermostat is constantly losing power. If I physically press on it the screen will come on for less than a minute, then off again. Im afraid this might be an issue with the device itself. Trouble shooting now.

There might be too much load on the transformer with the ac and the humidifier running at the same time, Try disconnecting the wire from the * terminal on the wyze and see if that fixes the problem.