Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by lisivka 3504 days ago
So, circumvent your furnace control logic to burn at max rate when it receives no commands from it remote controller, then go somewhere for a week. Engineers are stupid people, you know.
1 comments

My family has a furnace for heating water and the house. The furnace has a control unit that controls the burner and pumps. There is also a "manual operation" switch, to be used if the control unit fails, that simply switches everything on: pumps and the burner. The burner has a thermostatic control (that is set to a very high temperature and is essentially used to prevent it from boiling the water).

So, in this case, "burn at max rate" _is_ the safe setting to be used when the controller dies. The only unsafe situation that it will cause is that the hot utility water will be scaldingly hot, but there will be no increased danger of fire nor of CO poisoning.