The Honewell zone damper for the upstairs heat trunk didn't work

[Kaleva]

Installed it a few years ago because I wanted a way to keep the upstairs from getting too warm during the heating season. The t-stat is downstairs located in the foyer and thus the furnace will continue to run during a call for heat even if the upstairs is already warm enough.

Well, it worked great for about 1 season as I put a t-stat in the master bedroom which had the sole purpose of controlling the zone damper. Sometime during the second winter it would just make a clicking sound and not close. I tried to work on it with no success and not having the money to purchase a new one, I disconnected the wiring to it and that was that. Today I decided to work on it again and see if I could fix it.

This time I watched a YouTube video and followed along, discovering the problem with the damper was a nylon gear with some teeth broken off. The guy on the video said this was a common problem and explained how to flip the gear 180 degrees and thus make it work. I did that and now have a working zone damper and it cost me nothing but time.

Here is the video:

Since I installed central air this past summer, I'd like to install another damper in the downstairs trunk.

[Sherman A1]

1. YouTube is a great resource

For all sorts of home repairs.

[SWBTATTReg]

2. I think its great. You can find just about anything out there on fixing stuff. nt

[LakeSuperiorView]

3. There's also tons of lousy videos, unfortunately...

I watched maybe 15 people stumble though cleaning and setting a carburetor for a snowblower before finally finding one that had the info I needed. The key point was where to start with the jets. One guy explained what the default settings were and the engine was running well 10 minutes later. The other people really had no clue what they were talking about.

But yes, there's lots of things you can learn to do via YouTube.