Great, let me know if you find anything.
Has not been implemented yet, will have the possibility to have different fans depending on whether you are heating or cooling. Should be in the next version. I'll let you know if you want.
If it is only for short durations you could turn off the thermostat during your manual override time and then turn it back on when you are done.
Yes, will most likely do it like that. Main thing is to setup alerting so I know if temps are wildly over or under set temps.
Well.. It seems I jinxed it. I just got home from the holiday home and now I notice that the vThermostats are in emergency mode.
Looking at the problem remotely, it seems that my Fibaro Universal Sensor, which has my temp senors has stopped working, or the power supply has quit.
This means that my heaters are now not heating. I then try to turn them on, and a few seconds later they are turned off again. I then change the vThermostat to Auto again, turn on the heater, but then a few minutes later the vThermostat is back in emergency mode.
So, my question now is, how can I turn the vThermostat emergency stop off so that I can run the heaters manually via an RM rule ?
Just to clear it up, I am talking about 3 vThermostats, all accepting temps from 3 single sensors, that are all connected to the same Fibaro UBS. I do not blame the vThermostat (and I cannot really see if that could do anything to my temp sensors as they are just delivering the temp).
If you’re on a C7 you should be able to go to the apps page and temporarily disable the app (may have to click on the X in the upper right of the screen to get the option).
Thanks for the information. I am actually on a C4. I am still on v2.2.2.129.
Looking at the sensors again, I see that an additional sensor I have on the same Fibaro device is working, so it seems that the 3 I have in the vThermostat are acting up. I will revert to the old situation to see if that fixes things.
If you have some other sensor with a working temp sensor, set all thermostats to that sensor until you resolve the issue, at least some heat will be working everywhere.
Most motion sensors have them, water leak sensors, contact sensors?
Thanks for the suggestion. That is what I was going to do, I have a flood sensor for example that has temp. Before I did that I actually did a z-Wave repair, and that seems to have kicked this back into action, so for the moment it seems crisis has been adverted.
Now I just need to figure out why this happened in the first place. It has never happened before and as you can see on my Firmware version I am a bit conservative in updating as I have read about issues on the 2.2.4 version.
Thanks for thinking along with me on this one.
@nclark, in case this happens again, how can I change the thermostats to stop going back into emergency stop until I decide to have them act on it again ? BTW; I will now create an alert rule and use this thermostat state to alert me of issues with my temp probes.
You will probably just have to turn off the thermostat and then use a RM rule to keep the heat going, with Alerts, as you mentioned, to let you know you need to watch it manually until you get it fixed.
This looks promising as it’s what I have wanted to be able to do with my basement workshop heater. Now that I’ve got it installed, it won’t turn the plug on, ever. I am using a smart things contact sensor with temp reporting and a smart things outlet ( vs5). It won’t activate the plug and when I do it shuts off within one minute. The temperature is at least 6-8 degrees below my heating threshold. What advice can you give? Also, I have never used logging to be able to see reports, any guidance on that would be helpful too. Thanks for anything you can share.
Does it go into emergency Stop mode? If so that means the temp has not updated in the max update interval time. I don't remember what the default is 1 hour maybe? I upped mine to 180 three hours. it's a setting on the device page.
Just like terminal3 posted above, there is a safety that kicks in after 65 minutes (can be changed to a max of 180 minutes in the device page). This is done to make sure that a bad sensor won't make your heater not stop for several hours and cause a fire. Yes most small space heaters do have a built in thermostat that you can set to a few degrees higher than what you will set in HE, if this is the case you can safely bump that up.
Once the initial check in will be given from the sensor, all will go back to normal and unless the sensor does not report while the heater is heating, it will no longer go in emergency mode. Since you are using a ST contact sensor, you can do a refresh on the sensors device page to initiate a check in to start the ball rolling.
Thank you for your quick replies! I will give the refresh sensor a shot tonight. Thank you for the tip. How do I know if it is in emergency stop mode?
Also, I haven’t seen any explanations so I wanted to check... if I use thermostat scheduler with this virtual thermostat, does the vThermostat change it’s set points as directed by the scheduler? Just want to clarify how the two interact so I know I program it correctly. Thank you!
It will be indicated in the states on the device page, it is also logged as an error.
Yes it is compatible with Thermostat Schedular just like a regular thermostat. Everything has been coded so that it will act like any regular thermostat with the exact same commands. The big difference is that what a regular thermostat does internally, this has to do by software within HE (reason behind the emergency stop, a regular thermostat will do this within it's electronics/firmware).
I was wondering if anyone had ideas for using a button for a manual override? The thermostat has been working great using a Sonoff outlet and a dumb space heater. But there are times when I’d like to press the override button on the switch to force-turn-on the space heater for about 30 minutes, regardless of current temperature.
Any ideas on how to go about this?
Could do this is RM relatively easily, issue is going to be the conflict with your scheduler and if for instance the mode changes before that timer is up (assume you schedule based on mode), what happens? Does it return to 30 lower than the current mode (IMO wrong outcome). Also does this get overridden on a mode change (IMO wrong outcome as well)? Depending on what you want to do, you are going to have to store some data or make some of these actions cancellable and cancelled by mode change. But at the end of the day this is a scheduling request not a controller request.
Actually I just came up with this, could see if this works as I think it does:
Hold On should effectively stop the schedule
Heat +whatever should force the heater on
Hold Off should restart the schedule and restore the setpoint?? <-- What I am unsure about.
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I see that the Threshold is set to 1 F (and is listed as an attribute), but is there a way to change it?
Thanks!
Only in code, since this is a standard number for almost all electronic thermostats, 1° F or .5° C.
Thank you for your assistance with this! Refreshing the multipurpose sensor did the trick to get everything activated. (I've also had to set a rule to refresh the device every two hours as Smarthings multipurpose sensors seem to only update temperature readings when there is a change in state.) The vThermostat with Thermostat scheduler has been working like a dream!
Next version will have polling possibility for stubborn sensors, so before going into emergency mode, it will try polling the sensor to see if it responds, when using more than one sensor it will disable the sensor that is not responding, throw an error in the logs and continue going on with the remaining sensor(s). When the sensor starts reporting again, it will just add it back in the equation.
But one thing I find weird is that the SmartThings Multipurpose sensor is what I use in my garage (one on each door) and they have been flawless in reporting constantly the temps, maybe since it's in a garage and temps do go up and down more than inside a very well insulated home. Don't remember if they have settings for temp reporting in the device page (not home right now), but I would go see if you can change something in there.
