A DP almost by definition is nothing special. It is just a named way to solve a common problem. Given the number of likes, discussions, and PMs I’ve received on it I would say it is the most popular of all my DPs.
Actually,
I just wanted to mention it so when future readers come along they would think of that. I really don’t expect you to actually incorporate it into your tutorial, though if you did that would be great too. I do think it makes a great approach to ending the PARTY mode.
That is what I would use. Or perhaps some other power reading or how frequently a PIR triggers. I don’t know all of the information you have available to drive this. You could use a combination. But I suspect the lights alone would be sufficient.
You would think but you still had the question arise in one of the first responses…
In the U.S., everywhere I’ve ever lived and where I have family (so mainly Colorado, Texas, Virginia, and North Carolina) in suburban areas most houses in the 1200 sqft to 4000 sqft size are built using timber frame with fiberglass insulation and a brick, wooden composite, or stucco siding and often have inadequate insulation in the attic and the doors and windows are poorly insulated (unless the previous homeowner took it upon themselves to upgrade). Houses built between the 1970s and late 1990s (I’ve no direct experience with newer or older houses) in these areas almost all utilize forced air HVAC. Each room has one or more vents, one per room for smaller bedrooms, bathrooms, etc and two or more for larger bedrooms and living areas.This also applies to the apartments I’ve lived in as well. The vast majority of homeowners own a “used” house. Very few have the money and opportunty to build something new. And even few of those people have any realy choice in what sort of heating technology gets put in. The builder and architect designed the house for forced air and that is what you get.
In a forced air HVAC system there is usually only one zone for the entire house. Typically this means that there is also only one thermostat and only one temperature sensor driving the climate of the entire house. If it happens to be cold in the room with the Nest, the furnace will turn on regardless of what the rest of the house feels like. One can fine tune each room by adjusting the damper on each vent in a given room to be more or less opened to allow more or less of the cooled/heated air into the room. But these systems are designed to work with the movement of a certain volume of air. If one were to close or restrict too many vents the effeciency of their HVAC will drop significantly and they will end up spending more money for a less comfortable environment.
The way forced air works is there is a central fan that lives in the basement in houses that have a basement, or the attic in houses that do not. This fan sucks in air from one or more intakes in the house and pushes it through all the vents through ductwork. Before leaving the main unit it passes through something that changes the temperature of the air. For cooling, this is almost always the condenser from a heat pump (the compressor is almost always outside somewhere). For heating, this is either a grid of electric heating elements or the air passes over a plate of fire fed by natural gas which is piped into the house as a standard utility (think the burners of a propane barbeque grill).
In the warmer climates, it is going to cost 2-3x more to cool a house than it will the heat it and the restrictions on closing vents is more pronounced for cooling than heating. In colder climates (like where I live now) a house may not even come with air conditioning.
For those who have natural gas central heating and an air conditioner, the cost of cooling the house will be 2-3x more than the cost of heating it. Of course, this also means you probably live somewhere hot so the general climate dictates that. However, those with electric heating are screwed. When I live in Texas, people with electric heating would spend 2x more to heat their house than cool it is the summer, and it does not get that cold in Texas.
So the reason I only have one zone is because that is really the only approach that makes sense with a system like this. And this is the most common HVAC system for residential homes in suburbia, at least in the areas where I have experience. Adding a new zone to the house would cost upwards of $10k per zone to install a separate fan, heat pump, furnace and ductwork for the new zone. Some larger houses will have two or even three zones but those type of houses are well outside the affordability range of the majority of people in the world.
There have been kickstarters and such to create IoT vent covers (Keen comes to mind) that you can control how open and closed they are via home automation. But for my house, which is admittedly larger than average, I’d be looking at spending $110-$135 per vent * 25 vents = $2750 - $3375 (not counting the cost of the controller under the assumption I could make something work with OH). And even if I were to put a smart vent everywhere, there is a limit to how many I can close and by how much I can close them because of the airflow requirements of the system. When my heating bill is < $200 in the winter (I don’t have a heat pump so spend almost nothing in the summer) it would take a LONG time to justify the expense.
As for the how, I have a Nest located in the idiotic location the house builders ran the wires to put it, about 15’ from the front door. Typically one wants to put the thermostat near the core of the house and away from exterior doors to avoid drafts or poorly insulated doors from overheating the rest of the house.
As you can see from the above, I really had and continue to have no choice. Natural gas is too cheap to justify spending the amount of money necessary to add new zones for heating. And I live in a cool climate so will never run a central air conditioner, had I had one, enough to justify adding new zones for cooling.
Nest has a feature that would be fairly easy to do in OH where it will start heating the the house to your home temperature when you start heading home. If you commute is short it doesn’t buy you much. But if it is long enough you can come home to a comfortable home and avoid unnecessarily heating the house for hours on those days you go home closer to 12:00.
Oh to be young again…
Not seeing the rest of this conversation and based on my own PMs with @skatun, I would have to agree. I think the two approaches are very similar and only really differ in detail.
It is really shocking how popular that DP is. I would have expectd my Working with Groups in Rules or Assocaited Items DPs to be the most popular. But no, Time of Day gets the msot mentions, the most likes, the msot discussion, and the most use (guessing based on the rest).
I do this with my lighting. I discard the override at a safe point in time. In my case, when I enter the next Time of Day state. But you could easily choose any criteria to cancel the override. This is the reason I wrote my Deadman’s Switch DP as I needed a way to detect the override.
I can say from personal experience. We had an uncharacteristically cold day this last August (high < 60 degrees F) and the heater came on because the house was cold. My wife told me in no uncertain terms that the heater should never come on in August under any circumstances.
@ThomDietrich, this posting is looking as useful and popular as the InfluxDB+Grafan posting. Thanks for sharing.