One of my biggest projects over the years was building out a completely local reliant smart home system. The advent of the homekit integration finally got me what i needed for Ecobee. I no longer rely on the cloud for my ecobee needs. HOWEVER, there is one component that still haunts me and that is the mainenance/filter reminders.
I've always appreciated the periodic email and app notifications around maintenance. I've found a few forum posts from years back that talk about this, but nothing recently. What I am looking to do is have hubitat present me with these notifications. There's a few different items i'm trying to tackle:
Maintenance reminders bi-annually to remind me to call the company to check my system.
HVAC filter reminders. I've found some options to do this based on runtime, but i'd like to have one that i can trigger on a bi-annual basis.
I've looked at some third party apps, i've looked at other options using switches and variables. I really don't like the clunkiness of it. I would really like to build something a bit more naturally built. And given that it has been a few years since a thread about this came up, I wanted to see if anyone had any fresh ideas.
My ideal situation is that, having a trigger based on months, with a start date, and then every 6 months (or whatever cadence you set) it will trigger a notification. Even better would be if it acted like an alarm and repeats itself over a number of time until it is acknowledged.
I did include the two threads i found about this in case anyone wants to see past discussions.
I wrote a custom app to notify me based on runtime (which I find mostly more reliable than month-based counting, particularly for the few nice weeks we get in spring or fall when things don't run as much) -- but it sounds like that's not what you want and not that different from any of the above.
For your case, you could create a Rule Machine rule, triggered on your specific dates and times, with a single action that sends a notification. A periodic trigger with a custom cron expression (Hubitat now as a cron string generator built in you'll see when you create such a trigger) would give you the most flexibility, though you can also do simple schedules with built-in constructs.
Although I do have to add: in my case, the hub wouldn't be adding any value. I'd probably just do "Hey Siri (or Google or...), add a reminder on November 1 at 7 PM to check furnace" and "Hey Siri, add a reminder on May 1 at 7 PM to check furnace" and repeat as needed, giving me the added advantage of snoozing or seeing it on a calendar I already look at much more easily. But that's just me.
I did what @bertabcd1234 mentions. For filter reminders I made a RM rule for tracking hours of runtime. Once I exceed the hours I set the rule to send me Push notifications and then announces twice a day over my Alexa devices that it's time to change the filter. For maintenance I have a reminder on my phone.
Do you have any thoughts on how you decided your how much runtime to allow per change? I've looked at that before, in the ecobee itself but I could not find any good information about how much runtime would be considered the limit of the filter. Especially the aprilaire ones.
I don't think i was aware of the cron situation, that may hit the bill honestly. I'll have to investigate more.
As for the other suggestions, certainly also a possibility. I was just really trying to get away on any reliance from a third party server. Google/Amazon assistants included.
The standard is a minimum of 300 hours. This is especially the case if you have a cat or dog. If you don't have animals, you can go up to 400 hours depending on the MERV rating of your filter.
Thanks. I appreciate the information. I've got some inspiration from all this. (and realized i'm running my filters too long).
Current POC i setup is now using date variables. I have a global variable with the last change date, and then i used the cron function to trigger a rule that fires on March 1 or September 1 to remind me to change my smoke detector batteries. Then i have that rule set the variable for the day it kicked that off, and it compares it to the date of the last change. If that date is more than the last change date, it just keeps firing off to my phone once a day. I figured once this is perfected i can duplicate it into other functions.
Preliminary tests appear to work, but i think I can use this to build out more. I just really like the idea of maintaining all these items in one place. Either way, ya'll helped me alot here so thank you.
I started with this and after looking at my filters after many changes I decided I could go longer. I am currently at 400 hours. I also have a air purification system so I have the fan min run time set to 30 mins. So the fan is running at least 30 min every hour. So never goes much more than a month. We do have two cats in the house but the filters still don't seem to get very dirty or have much cat hair after 400. I am using MERV 13 filters.
Good to know. I started mine at 500 but i'm going to monitor it and see as well. I was doing every 6 months and after recently looking at mine at 5 months, i think i need to revist my timings.
