RV Thermostat Replacement: Installing a Digital Thermostat

We're gonna install a digital thermostat in this unit here. This has got an older style. It's a Suburban, it only does the furnace. The new models today will do probably both the furnace and the air conditioner but this model has the air conditioner controls on the roof unit itself. So first thing we wanted to do is make sure exactly the size that we have that will fit.

The newer RV style digital thermostats are gonna be a lot wider. I don't have the room to put it into here. Suburban does not make an upgrade for this version so we're just gonna use a residential style. All the residential's will do both heating and cooling so we're just gonna make sure we don't put the jumper wire for the cooling section in it. So the first thing we've done, we've actually taken the negative cable off the battery just to make sure we don't have any issues.

We're gonna pull this off. We just got a couple screws that are right here to hold our old style in. We pull it out here and see that basically there's two wires. With this model here they've been actually soldered on to the back here and then they've got a connection on the inside. We gonna clip those off.

And the nice thing about the digital thermostat here, it's gonna allow me to program. This actually has what they call a five, two day program so I can do five different temperature settings and I can do two different. Like the weekends versus the week day. Probably a lot more than most RVs are going to need but I do like the fact that it's digital. I like the fact that it's got more solid state in the mechanism itself so it's a little less delicate in cold weather or road vibrations and I can program it a little bit.

I may leave the unit up on a weekend or throughout the week and just go up on weekends to the campgrounds so during the week I'd want it to go down a little cooler when I get into the fall and just be able to set that so I save a lot of propane. So we gonna hook this up. First thing we'll do is we'll cut these wires. So here's something you have to be careful of. You notice when I clipped those wires, they shot back down inside this whole here, back behind this false panel and I don't have an access panel here, here, anywhere around here to get those.

So I'm gonna have to go in to the bathroom and take the shower apart and get those wires and fisher back through. There, so if you put a little kink in, maybe even tie a knot in before when you're ready to let go of em. Just do a little something like that just to kinda keep it from going in. So now we're gonna hook up our system here. So we're gonna take these wires and we'll strip the ends.

All right and we're gonna take our fan and put on the G and we're gonna take our heater and put on the W. I don't wanna bring 'em through first and put our fan. It's awfully smalls so I'm gonna go in like this. So we notice holes don't line up to give us a good center so we're just gonna drill some new holes. It's nice and snug.

Look and make sure that's centered. All right then we take and install our batteries. We're gonna put two of the double As in the series there and then we see it actually is coming on right now. It's gonna give up 12 o'clock now if I had air conditioning controls with this as well I would have to put those wires in heat pump, that type of stuff. So take a look at the type unit you have.

Check with your owner's manual and then get the type of thermostat or digital thermostat that fits your unit. Then simply pops right in. Now I've got a nice programmable thermostat and I can adjust it for cooler times when I'm not in the unit in the fall and again if I have an air conditioning system I can adjust that high and low as I'm in or not in my RV. Once we tried to fire up our furnace, we found that it wasn't working properly and after looking at the owner's manual of the furnace it had a little different configuration than what the thermostat had so we came back in and now we've got the wires. We put a little clip to make it easier to get in there and we are on the RH and W in this configuration so make sure you check with your owner's manual of your furnace.