Washington ClimateMaster: AUX heat not kicking in when freeze protection is set to 30.

Hello,
What is the expected behavior of the ClimateMaster 27 freeze protection system? From a separate post I know that my loop is too closely spaced and undersized. I looked into an additional well to supplement my horizontal loops as I don't have any additional space for more horizontal loops. Cost was prohibitive. Have added the AUX heater to my system and want to configure it so that if my loop temps drop too low the AUX will kick in and give my loop field time to recover. The AUX heat works as I am able to turn it on at the thermostat. However, when I jumper the clipped J3 connection, the AUX never comes on. What is the expected behavior and any tips on troubleshooting?
Roger

 

Aux heat is controlled by the thermostat "W" wire to the HP control board. The thermostat settings usually allow for a droop in room temperature before it is activated. I don't believe a lock out condition from the Climatemaster board changes aux heat operation.

HP model # and thermostat make and model # would help as not all are equal.

 

Hello geoxne,
My thermostat is a RCS TZ45 and a Climatemaster 27. My thermostat can turn on the AUX heat just fine. My question is "what is the expected behavior of the ClimateMaster when the freeze protection is engaged by low temp" Does the furnace automatically turn on AUX heat, or does it shutdown?

Roger

 

Your thermostat interprets this as Emergency Heat, not Aux Heat.

Aux heat is a stage. Emergency heat is backup. So you'd need to ensure parameters are set accordingly.

 

Hi urthbuoy,
My thermostat has an emergency heat setting that works to bypass the regular heat pump function. That works fine. I also assume that if I configured AUX heat to turn on if the heat pump could not keep up with the weather that would also work fine. Haven't tried it yet but see no reason for it not to work since the EMR heat is able to turn on the ELEC heat. My question is. What is the expected behavior of the furnace if the loop temp sensor goes below the set point? Does it automatically go into EMR heat regardless of the thermostat settings, of does it just shut down?
How would you describe it to a prospective customer that was going to deploy this to an open loop from a pond when they ask, "what will the furnace do if the pond water gets too cold"?

Thanks

 

It's the thermostat that decides AUX run, not the heat pump. The heat pump does decide when it locks out though.

There are a lot of thermostats. Basically a dumb one will try and run the heat pump, not knowing it is locked out, and go through all the stages until it hits the stage that AUX is on. This can be a run time delay or a not-maintaining-setting demand. The emergency setting is something you manually choose on the thermostat.

Smarter thermostats communicate with the heat pump and can stage quicker.

 

Thanks for the response. Any thermostats you can recommend, especially one that supports z-wave?
Roger