Success! 0-10 Volt Control of AC Infinity (or any EC fan motor) using Leviton ZS057-D0Z Zigbee Dimmer or Zooz Zen54 zWave 0-10V dimmer

💡 Lighting
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Great project. This is exactly the kind of thing I think of when I hear the word "automation." Motion activated lighting and laundry timers have their place, for sure, but something like this with multiple systems and sensors all integrated and working together is brilliant. Again, great work.

And as an FYI for anyone who may want to follow in your footsteps, a couple of pointers that I'm sure you learned along the way...
-Balance is key. Air out will always equal air in. If you exhaust 200 CFM and don't have an active intake of the same amount, air will find its way in wherever it can. This includes cracks and gaps as well as (worst case) the flues of fuel fired appliances like water heaters, furnaces, and fire places. If those happen to be firing at the time, it's possible to pull CO directly into your home.
-0-10V is a common analog control signal in building automation (HVAC & lighting). For anyone looking for a zigbee alternative, It seems that the Sinope MC3100ZB might be a great place to start.

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Thanks Dylan :slight_smile: It’s nice to hear from someone on the same wavelength!

Balancing an HRV/ERV is quite important as you can skew the heat exchanger performance significantly by altering flow. I’ll post a few test pics to illustrate.

One of my secondary goals with this project is having a ventilation system that can also skew air balance in reaction to other events in the home. The induction cooktop in our kitchen uses current sensing to fire up an EC inline fan on the kitchen exhaust hood. The house pressure goes slightly negative when this happens. This in turn causes the HRV to run at 90 CFM (its highest balanced air flow) to increase air exchange. In a warmer climate you could as easily increase fresh air intake to balance the kitchen hood exhaust…bringing the house back to neutral pressure. In essence I’ve built a dynamic make up air system here.

We have a high efficiency wood burning fireplace that can back puff a bit of smoke when opening the air-tight door to load. Skewing the HRV fresh air intake fan to max stops this completely as the house pressure goes slightly positive.

In the latest tweaks in my Hubitat rule set the HRV fan speeds are being set according to live CO2 measurements in the house (there are four scenes that correspond to balanced fan speeds at 50, 60, 75 and 90 CFM). This minimizes the energy footprint of the ventilation system to just what is needed for healthy air in the home :-). I’ve done the same with the electric heaters..they dynamically vary (via the Zooz dimmers) wattage to maintain the target output temperature.

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I managed to refine a few items related to control:

  1. Co2 levels in the house now actively control the HRV's air flow.

  2. Heating of the air into the living space is now actively modulated based on a combination of the HRV CFM air flow setting, and the difference between incoming air temp vs target air temp. This is pretty cool...the wattage output to the inline heaters is recalculated and adjusted every time the incoming fresh air temperature changes, or CFM changes.

If the HRV is running at 50 CFM, and air is coming in at 58 F (cuz it's 8 F outside!) then we can figure out how many btu/watts are required to heat that air. The formula for BTUs required is 50 CFM x 1.08 x Temp delta. So if we want 50 CFM of air to be 68 F hitting the room, we need to add 50 x 1.08 x (68-58) or 540 BTU. Divide that by 3.14 and we get 171 watts of heat.

Turns out that outputting 171 watts of heat to my inline PTC heaters does indeed raise the temp from 58 to 68 F. Increase the CFM, or lower the input temp and more watts are needed. I scratched my head a bit on how to turn this information into a few automation rules that would set the Zooz dimmers connected to the heaters based on live data.

The dimmers use a setting from 0-100 so I needed to figure out how many watts the heaters used at each dimmer setting. I took about 10 measurements using a kilawatt type meter. Then I plotted those points to find that the dimmer/vs watts relationship was pretty linear. This link allows you to enter a few points and derive a simple equation for that relationship...you'll see it pre-populated with my two reference points:

Slope Calculator

This slope calculator solves for parameters involving slope and the equation of a line. It takes inputs of two known points, or one known point and the slope.

DIMMER SETTING = 0.122 * WATTS + 16

So combining the formula for watts and the dimmer, now I had a formula that would tell me what dimmer setting to use for a given wattage. The /2 in there is because I have two heaters so each will get half of the total wattage requirement fed to them.

DIMMER SETTING = .122 * (((CFM x 1.08 x (Temp Delta))/3.41)/2) + 16

Hubitat variable math does not do brackets (I think???). In Webcore this would all be one line of code, but here is what it looks like as you step through the calculation above using Hubitat's built in Rule Machine:

heater_code
heater_code1228×975 203 KB

I may not even understand all this in a month, but I do think it's kind of cool that the heating system is continuously varying the heat output based on live measured conditions and the desired end result. It's a simple predictive system.

To my surprise, it actually works and the output temperature stays within a pretty small window of 1-2 F. In cold temps the system needs to stop every 30 minutes and recirculate air to warm the core up. When it goes back into ventilation mode (starts pulling cold air in again), the incoming air steadily drops as the heat exchange core cools. This heating setup compensates for that quite precisely and sets the heater wattage at exactly what it needs to be set at to get 67 F fresh air dumping into the main living area.

This is the code that switches up the EC fan speeds based on Co2 detected:

co2_code
co2_code1221×976 159 KB

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@Kyl did get his Fantech EC fan working using the wiring below, with what he figures is a 10V reference voltage added in (he'll post here with follow up pics)

Fantech red 10v reference AND Fantech yellow 0-10v input -> leviton purple +0-10v

Fantech 0-10v GND (blue) - > leviton -0-10v (grey)

I won't pretend to understand why it works, but Kyl can explain with his follow up post. Just adding this here for reference.

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Some good news for a low cost 0-10V dimmer that will work in US/Canada :slight_smile:

It's good for up to 4 amps or 960 watts, so perfect for an EC motor fan:

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Maximum wattage on the site has to be a typo. 4 Amps at 10 Volts give you only 40 watts.

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4A at 240V = 960W load max

SPECIFICATIONS

  • Z-Wave Frequency: 908.42 MHz (US)

  • Power: 120-240 VAC, 50/60 Hz

  • Maximum Loads: 4 A, 960 W

  • Z-Wave Range: Up to 300 feet line of sight or up to a mile with Long Range enabled)

  • Dimensions: 1.5" tall, 1.4" wide, 0.7" deep

  • Operating Temperature: 32-104° F (0-40° C)

  • Installation: Indoor use only

Control and Load

image
image600×600 62.5 KB

Looks like the yellow switch wire is only on/off.
Dimming by Z-Wave only. :thinking:

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Second @dylan.c accolades. This is a concert of useful automation that goes "well beyond the lights".

I ended up here because of exactly what you talked about. Installing an exhaust hood in combination with an existing wood stove.

My first reaction was : "ah geez....sure enough, somebody with ingenuity in the forum has taken this air balance stuff seriously. So what started as a hood installation just expanded, unless I pretend I didn't stumble upon this.

Good work.

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About this dimmer -

Leviton seems to go to great effort to avoid copious use of the label "Zigbee" on this Lumina RF Product sheet.

https://www.leviton.com/en/products/brands/lumina-rf-room-controller

Zigbee IS mentioned on a couple of products but not explicitly on the dimmer you highlighted.

This leaves me wondering if pure Zigbee is the core of this Lumina RF environment OR is it some mix of proprietary stuff AND some additional accommodation of the Zigbee protocol.

Thanks in advance for your insights having dug into this Leviton line some.

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@PunchCardPgmr , thanks for those kind words. I have added a make up air profile to the HRV automation triggered by the kitchen exhaust hood automation. Power use on the induction cook top is detected via an Aeotec 240 Volt switch which in turn triggers the exhaust hood fan via an Aeotec micro relay. In this profile I run the HRV stale air fan at about 40 CFM, and run the HRV fresh air fan at 100 CFM (max). That 60 CFM does make a difference as the kitchen exhaust system (rated at 340 CFM) actually flows 110 CFM (measured with all ducting in place) at it's normal setting. The kitchen exhaust fan is also an inline ECM fan which we run about about 60% speed.

More on the ECM kitchen exhaust fan project using a Terrabloom metal case ECM fan: Automate Kitchen Exhaust Hood Fan using inline ECM fan - Turbocharge yer exhaust! | The Garage Journal

We have a high efficiency fireplace and running the HRV in the unbalanced mode definitely eliminates smoke puffs on loading (fireplace air tight door open). As homes get tighter, this balancing issue becomes more and more important if you have any type of combustion device that does not already use outside air for combustion.

You are correct...no mention of Zigbee anywhere on the Illumina RF products. I went off a post I found on the interwebs about an older Illumina RF dimmer and rolled the dice on this dimmer switch to try it. If I had to guess, I'd say Ilumina RF is just Zigbee as the ZS057-D0Z is detected and working perfectly as "Leviton Zigbee Dimmer" device in Hubitat.

Once that Zooz 0-10v is out of beta, I'll for sure grab one and try it out for the kitchen exhaust fan. I've been wanting to ramp that fan based on power use by the cooktop below it, instead of just using one setting.

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The key is to load the stove when the fire is almost out, not feeding it when it's going strong.

However, I could've used some kind of air balance the other day. It was warm the day before, so I let the fire go totally out in my fireplace insert. It has a tendency to downdraft down the chimney somewhat when it gets totally cold, so a little newspaper and a cracked open nearby window is the ticket.

Alas, I had forgotten about this as I started a fire and went out to the garage to get some more wood. The living room got pretty smokey!

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@velvetfoot , our unit is a fairly large, high efficiency fireplace (60K BTU) with outside air for combustion. The door is mostly glass and large, so you need to be very careful opening it (as in very slowly) to let the inside air draft up the chimney as you open the door. Any bit of negative pressure though and it will puff smoke for a moment as you open the door.

If the HRV is running in that asymetric mode though, zero smoke and you don't need to be so careful opening the door. There is an equilibrium adjustment going on when you open the fireplace door from mainly outside air via the internal burn control air box, to inside air via the open door. The fireplace has a separate control to cut off outside air, but I always have this open when the unit is in use.

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Interestingly I ran across code calling for air balance in various localities that kicks in at 400CFM. That's the top end of the fan in this micro I'm adding so that had me delving into this all the while thinkin, well....just disable the high setting :wink:

An appliance repair guy I know says he's never seen anybody bother with this unless in a new-build. The prevalence of leaky houses making up the air balance being his point.

I get what you guys are saying about the "situational awareness" necessary to avoid the puff of smoke, EVEN W/O any bath or kitchen exhaust running it seems to happen if your fire is not in the right phase.

There's plenty of folk that put in "fire appliances" only to have the wife realize they can be in conflict with those beautiful ivory curtains. The occasional "puff of smoke" happens no matter what. But those folks that live around this aspect of ambiance & function in the Winter wouldn't give it up... and just adjust their interior decorating to accommodate it,

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There's plenty of dust, spiders, etc involved as well, lol.

Throw in the "chimney effect" as well, where the lowest level is under negative pressure and the highest, positive pressure.

"They" want to regulate these things, and anything non-electric, out of existence. The EPA comes out with some wood appliance rules for some of its assumed conditions, and the result is in a lot of cases, say for me in a two story home burning dry wood, the draft gets way too high and you can't control the fire so that it doesn't get too hot.

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Was looking at what's out there on the market these days and was struck by the amount of marketing I was seeing showing "through the external adjacent wall" configurations vs the traditional vertical run chimney. Wonder if that's the bulk of the installations these days, even if new built, due to the designs negating the need for "the ole vertical stack".

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You talking gas fireplaces? Otherwise, you need a chimney.

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Yes it is, for gas fireplaces anyway. Its direct vent coaxial pipe typically.
Source: I work for a fireplace company and used to install/service them.

If anyone ever has any gas/wood/pellet fireplace questions just hit me up in the lounge or PM.

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I could have sworn I was seeing more thru-the-wall vented high efficiency wood stoves with more significant heat capture than in the past and even lower temp fresh air + exhaust pipe combos.

But I think you guys are right, my bulk memory here is indeed recollecting the wood burning stuff AND the gas stuff that I've been seeing at over the last year.

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Maybe you're thinking pellet stoves?

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Probably so.