Thermostat - Aux Heat Control

Thanks for adding to this topic!

You mentioned “manually turning aux on…”
How did you do that?
I’ve not seen that in the app…

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Can Wyze officially confirm what parameters kick the aux heat on? Is this documented anywhere?

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I’m glad you brought this up!
I really like Wyze products, but this is a concern.
I appreciate the people that have contributed to this thread but I’m afraid to experiment with unofficial wiring.
I really don’t know what to do!
I’ve seen Wyze make improvements to their products… I hope they can improve this, or at least give me an official workaround.
Our electricity usage is up 250 kWh from last year… and the really cold weather hasn’t even kicked in yet.

I would like to see this as well. Also, in Oregon, to get a rebate for installing a heat pump, you have to be able to lock out the aux heat when the outside temp is above a certain temp (e.g. 40 degrees). I don’t see any way to do that.

Okay… For the record… We are in the single digits today (like a lot of people)… 5°F and my system still trying to use the heat pump.
If I bump the setting up about 10° warmer than what I want… it seems to go to aux heat. When it gets to the temperature I want, I have to turn it down to cooler than I want, which will turn it off. If I don’t turn it off… the heat pump will kick in again and blow cool air into my house.
So basically I have to watch it all the time… I’m the thermostat.

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Wyze is never going to address this. It’s been over a year with several LONG threads about this.

Over the weekend we had to put our old thermostats on because it was so cold outside. The Wyze tstats were just running and running and running. There are three huge issues that I am aware of;

Temperature sensor is broken. It will read “74” for example, while heating to 75, and just run forever and ever. If you manually shut it off or bump the temperature down, after a few minutes it’ll read “76”. So it’s been running for hours, but had actually reached temperature already. That’s one major issue.

Second - heat strip comparability is just weird. Sometimes they kick in after 30min, sometimes never, sometimes if you bump the temp up over 5 degrees.

Heat pump compatability is awful. My electric usage went up by 3x last month. And over the weekend when it was in the teens, our usage for that one day it was super cold and windy was over 300kwh. For one day.

NO AUX/EM HEAT CONTROL.

Last months electric bill was over $500 and this is purely from Wyze running the system all day and night. I have a feeling next month is going to be worse, unless we take this off the walls.

Just for clarity - when I put the old tstats on, the heat kicks on with heat strips as it should, and satisfies the temp within an hour on those cold days. With Wyze tstats on the wall, it’ll run and run and run even though the temp has been ACTUALLY SATISFIED - it’s reporting the wrong temp and just won’t shut off when it’s cold. This causes a MASSIVE spike in electricity usage. BUT when you turn it off or bump the temp down, it’ll then read the correct temperature…meaning it should have shut the system off hours ago. Lmaooooo. Toss the old tstat on, and it’ll cycle normally. This is just so ridiculous at this point.

MOD NOTE: Post edited to conform to the Community Guidelines.

Amen, agree 100%. Same here electricity usage went through the roof with these units. Reinstalled my old thermostats and even thought the recent cold spell my system was able to hit temps with way less heat strip usage.

Officially returning both of my wyze thermostats.

It’s just bugged out.

Here’s the other side of the coin…right now currently, it’s 74 in the house. Heat is on to 75. For whatever u godly reason Wyze won’t activate the strips, so the heat pump is just running and running for hours trying to get to 75.

The kicker? It’s actually 75 in here. If I knock the temperature back to 74, the system will shut off and Wyze tstat after a minute or so will read 76. So it was actually at temperature the entire time…but the system is just running ALL DAY LONG.

This happens when it’s 25-30 outside. If it’s above 50-60, Wyze tstats work just fine most of the time.

I would think, this wouldn’t be that hard of a problem to solve. It’s just a software issue as far as I can tell.
Maybe I’m just not looking in the right place for an answer.
I noticed the moderator took time to edit one of the previous comments… but didn’t have time time give us any information on the subject.

@SlabSlayer Where are you reading this? (the logic and differential temps for aux heat)

I have a geothermal heat pump, meaning things work fine at 0F and below as my heat source is the ground. It’s the Aux heat coming on that causes my bills to go up. WIth the Nest and EcoBee you can set the differential temperatures for aux to kick in, they default to I believe 2.3F and my existing honeywell kicks in at 2F, both too aggressive power wise IMHO.

Welcome to the Wyze User Community Forum @king.robert.j! :raising_hand_man:

As I stated in my post, I was trying myself to get an understanding of the logic and temp deltas used to control the Aux\Emerg heat from posts I read.

I posted links within my posts to the resources I was reading. Follow those links.

What I have learned though, is that the Wyze Thermostat is not very efficient at managing use of Aux\Emerg heat.

@SlabSlayer Thank you and glad to be here. I have some Wyse cameras and a vacuum cleaner

The only external link I saw in the thread here was a picture of the emergency heat. That said, this thread was the most promising in that the 5f differential you mentioned aligns better with what I want, economy over comfort. I was just hoping to find official Wyze documentation, or did you mean by links what others had found out?

FYI I did search the forum and reach out to Wyze before posting. Nothing on the forum and so far Wyze is just giving me irrelevant cut and past responses. I’ve got a dual zone system, so trying not to have to spend $400+ which Nest and Ecobee will have me doing.

BTW, nobody really does all that good a job on heat pumps/geothermal. But it’s the abuse of AUX heat and/or not understanding it that causes the most problems.

Thanks for your comments.

If you do find it, please share. The only documentation that I have ever found for the Thermostat can be found in the Wyze Knowledge Articles:

https://support.wyze.com/hc/en-us/sections/360011338991-Wyze-Thermostat

And what should be loosely referred to as a User Guide:

I looked around for official documentation on the 5° 30m emerg\aux heat programmed logic but haven’t found any. I believe I picked that up from reading the OP’s post.

There are many mysteries of logic and behavior hiding behind that little black screen that have yet to be uncovered and documented.

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I’ve experimented with forcing the Second Stage Heat to kick in… I haven’t had any luck with 5° but if I bump the thermostat up 10° over the current inside temperature, the Second Stage Heat comes on.

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Next best thing, a quote from Wyze tech support:

The 4F temp differential is in the Honeywell range for “economical” use of a heat pump so I’m good with that, and also the timeout is normal for the algorithm’s, although I’d have wished Jennifer had disclosed the timeout. Even better if both these numbers could be programmed by the users. The issue with 4F is if you make big jumps with your program settings.

As I mentioned elsewhere, using outdoor temperature for GeoThermal AUX heat decision is a big no no since it uses the earth as a heatsink, not outdoor air. I imagine there are workarounds but contemplating returning the units I bought (not installed yet).

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Thanks for the information!
She said, " outdoor weather is used to determine when to run only the Aux heat"…
As far as I can tell, it doesn’t know what the outdoor heat is.

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I’ve seen some talk here it uses internet weather to determine outdoor temperature. She of course doesn’t state that, but I asked for a clarification in a follow up.

This feature for a standard heat pump is a good thing and I’ve seen complaints in posts from 2020 it wasn’t sensing outdoor temp. This ‘feature’ for geothermal is the opposite, a bad thing.

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Thanks for posting that!

Not only is the internet sourced outdoor temp “data” an issue since there is no capability for an external temperature sensor and far too little room in a 4° delta for local temp variances, but the “behavior settings” mentioned that determine the “default run time” are also a complete mystery. Wyze has never revealed the secret behind any of these settings. What are they?

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So I’m revisiting the “Behavior” settings… because I just set it for max Savings.
The descriptions for the settings are not helpful, so it was just a guess.

This could be the solution to my problem if they would provide some good information here.
They could start by showing me what the system thinks the Outdoor Temperature is…

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Bit by bit I getting more data as support responds to me. 35F seems to be the point it ONLY runs AUX heat, which for a Geothermal user, would cause a massive unnecessary electric bill since we reference ground temp, and not air temp

As such, I informed support they should stop marketing the product as GeoThermal compatible, as it clearly isn’t. The good news, and I say this as a IoT firmware developer, is this would be a easy fix for them, just define two types of heat pumps and have Geothermal not respond to the <35F flag. Now if they can or will do this, remains to be seen but I hope so as I won’t need to return my units I just ordered.

Below latest dialog from support. Bolding is mine

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