Here was the wiring on my old thermostat. Can you help me to better understand how I should have it wired on the Wyze? I have a heat pump and electric backup.
The blue W2 wire is your heating coils, so if you wanted to run it as both emergency or stage 2, you would wirenut 2 short jumper wires to it, and attach one of them to W1 and one to *. If you only wanted it to be emergency heat, you could attach it to * only, but then your house might get colder than you like until the emergency heat temp is hit and the heat switches over to emergency mode. Either way, you’d have to reset the wyze and remove it from the app and then re-add it, telling it that you have a wire attached to *. then when you are setting it up, it will ask you what is on * and you will tell it emergency heat. After you have told it this, you should be able to run the heat in emergency mode only without the compressor running, on demand from within the app.
What gauge wire do I have to use? Could I use a stand of Cat5E?
Cat5e is generally 24 AWG, and the thinnest you want to use for thermostat wire is 20 AWG. You need a pretty short jumper, but as it is for emergency use, you probably want something you know is going to work for a long period of time without overheating. You should be able to double it up to decrease its resistance, if that’s the only wire you have. (Twist the ends of 2 strands of cat5e together and use 2 for each jumper)
I still don’t have the emergency heat option and it threw an error. I had to select furnace/ forced air for W1.
You have to reset it and tell it you have a wire attached to E on your old thermostat when you set it up.
I never had anything on E though. I’m lost now lol.
Your old thermostat might have had an internal logic jumper that allowed it to run W2 as an emergency heat source. If you want the wyze to allow you to turn on just the heat without the compressor running, it needs to think you have an E wire.
So what wire do I run to E? Do I split the W2 wire to W2 and E instead of “*”?
The wyze does not have an E terminal, it uses * for this. If you tell it that you have an E wire, it will walk you through where to put it.
How hard is it exactly to add 2 wires and a wirecap to the aux heat and then connect it to BOTH w1 and *…you then have exactly what you have NOW…it comes on for second stage if there is a wide temperature discrepancy but you can turn it on/off manually in the app as well. DONE.
I did exactly that @famewolf. However, when I ran through setup again it says that I have an extra wire as you can see in the picture I shared. So, I still have no option to manually energize emergency heat.
Yes, you have to tell it that you have an E wire before you put the wire in the * position. It’s an unfortunate side effect of wyze trying to make the thermostat too easy to install.
Well, I have been reading this thread and with all of the issues I see for those with heat pumps, I had to ask myself “why in the world would I have purchased one of these thermostats for my heat pump?” But I did, because I believed in this company since I had great experiences with their cameras.
What a mistake I made, I followed all of the instructions, got the unit up and operating. There is NO choice, based on the way I was instructed to wire, to see anything associated with the heat pump, stage-2 heat etc. on the APP.
In fact, I have calculated my usage since I installed the unit and its gone up at least 20%. This is NOT what I purchased the unit for. Seems, it is set up for furnaces and A/C systems and anything beyond that is not going to work with this unit. I am removing it today and installing my old 18 year old thermostat with nice little toggle switches that allow me to control my unit. It’s too bad because I really wanted this thermostat to work.
I had great success with the cameras I purchased. I had a watch on order but am cancelling that as well. I lose faith in a company when they roll out technology that has not been tested fully before customers have to work out there own solutions. I only hope those brittle little wires that I carefully straightened out to put the WYZE unit on, will not break when I put my old unit back on. This has turned out to be a costly (money and time) drain I did not need.
Here’s my wiring for the old unit, and how I wired the WYZE one based on the instructions, The APP shows nothing regarding emergency heat, stage-2 heat etc. My usage has gone up 20% since I installed the new thermostat because it is cycling on emergency almost every time it turns on. The outside temp yesterday was in the 40s. Arrggh, I am now trying to attach two .jpg, one of my old wiring and one of me new wiring. Because I am a “new” user I can only upload 1 image, So I have combined both before and after into one image to upload, anyone want to take a crack at this be my guest 
@wxman, I’m in the same boat, as many others with a heat pump and electric heat. To answer your post, you have everything wired correctly, per Wyze instructions. My old thermostat, by Honeywell, was wired identical to yours. After getting bounced around by Wyze Wizards who ultimately told me to hire a third party off of Angie’s list or some such app to install it for me, I realized Wyze was never going to fix their product, nor train any of their support on it. I’ve spent 20 years wiring and programming more thermostats than I can remember; I’m not the guy you suggest hiring this out to a third party.
I have not seen anyone conclude they have gained anything by installing this thermostat. The overwhelming majority of posts relate to asking either why it simply doesn’t work, or why is it using so much more energy than their old one. I highly recommend saving yourself some energy, and return it, if possible.
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I opened a support ticket but no one has bothered to reply. Maybe they are overwhelmed with the amount of issues people are having. At least these were cheap, so I’m not out much. The deal with enabling emergency heat and not being able to enter a set point is really a bad design. I know my heat pump can’t keep up when it is below zero, so to save it from trying I used to put emergency heat on and it would shut off when it reached my desired temp. With Wyze it just runs forever. I’m switching back to my old ones until (or if) I see some updates and progress on these.
The cameras seem great. The vacuum is pretty decent except I can’t edit the maps anymore and it can’t map a small area without re-doing everything. I have a doorbell cam in the pipeline somewhere and I hope it is good!
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Thanks for the information, I am done with the company at this point. NO support, they grew too big, too quickly…
I have a heat pump and love the thermostat.
I love telling Alexa to turn the heat up and hearing it kick on immediately.
You forget the product is only around $50. They roll it out and add functionality and updates later.
If you wanted more should’ve gone with the $200 product.
Uh no, they should have noted that they do not support heat pumps yet, I imagine you probably work for WYZE so I understand your comments