The crazy swings in temp lately have me wondering about getting more control of our thermostat. Currently I have a rule set up and working very well for turning it down at night and back up during the day etc. Issue is for example currently it is 54 outside and when I set sleep mode, thermostat will get changed from 67/71 to 65/66. Because it is in auto, this will turn on the AC which isn't needed.
I'm not quite sure how to bring in heat/cool/auto control based on outside temperature. I feel like if I just set up a changed trigger with conditionals that will cause issues with my Honeywell Wifi thermostat get so many commands.
I expect you would at least want a range for triggering on and off, if you know what I mean. So, in Winter have a low temp setting that triggers heating, that then turns off say 3-5 degrees higher than that low-point, then if the temperature reaches the low point again, trigger the heating to come back. I'm assuming the point you are making is that when you can have a mixture of cold and hot periods in the shoulder months, there are days / periods where you want more of a focus on heating and some where you want a focus on cooling. We're experiencing similar weather over here as we move through Spring.
Maybe it requires a combination of inside / outside comparison logic as well as weather forecasting information, to try and gauge the type of day / night it is likely to be. With this you may be able to introduce some kind of weighting system for days where it is likely to be warmer or cooler, dictating whether you favour cooling or heating and how to assess changes in temperature? Can't claim any experience in using any logic for my heating / cooling, just an idea...
This is exactly the scenerio I'm dealing with. I suppose I could do a rule triggered by temperature change and have the conditions be ranges but that would still be triggering a lot.
I guess the kind of this I was describing was something like:
Create Global Variable - GV_WEATHER_MODE - values could be hot, cold, nice
Setup a rule to set the GV_WEATHER_MODE based on predicted weather conditions or even allow it to be manually set, or both.
Setup two rules:
Heating Mode Rule
Predicate: GV_WEATHER_MODE = "cold"
Trigger: Indoor Temperature reports <= X
Action: Turn on heating
Wait for temperature to reach >= X+5
Turn off heating
Cooling Mode Rule
Predicate: GV_WEATHER_MODE = "hot"
Trigger: Indoor Temperature reports >= X
Action: Turn on cooling
Wait for temperature to reach <= X-5
Turn off cooling
Obviously still not the smartest setup, you could adjust it more and more as you got, including handling the "nice" days, which are kind of what you are looking for I know. This really only handles the day to day swings in conditions, not within the same day, although could could update the GV during the day as well....
I guess the point I wanted to make by spelling it out, was that you should not see a flurry of commands if there is a decent enough gap in temperatures or even if you introduce some other conditions to avoid triggering for a period of time since the last time heating / cooling was used.
The GV is kind of solving a slightly different problem to the one you described. What I was trying to do was, using the weather prediction, also predict the likely swing in temperature once you hit the temperature that turns off the heating / cooling. So if it is likely to be a warm day naturally, when the cooling has done it's job and cooled the house down, use the prediction of a warmer climate outside to tell your rules not to engage the heating so readily. Then the reverse would be true when it is a cooler day, not turning on the AC when the heating has brought the house up to the desired temperature.
I would expect humidity would also need to be a factor, cooling down saturated warm air too quickly, I am guessing, would also be a bad thing, you would probably want to run that in conjunction with a dehumidifier of some sort, or run a drying mode on the A/C.
I myself have been looking at a more intelligent predictive thermostat. Coming from Vera, I used to use this app, which worked great. Antor – Smart Virtual Thermostat
Well here's a first go at it. I have current thermostat state as a condition in order to have only actual changes going through. I'm not totally sure about the trigger but I feel like it's the best mix of simple and effective.
