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Home Automation Part 5 – The Thermostat and First Graphed Temp Data

So we had a highly productive weekend here around the old homestead. Link moved from a crib to a bed, which is very exciting… and we moved a ton of furniture and hung some photos. All in all, a lot got done…

But your here to hear about how my home automation project is going.

The new thermostat arrived and we got it installed. It solved the problem of our A/C running 24/7. I also adjusted our blower speed on our furnance, and that too seems to have helped to keep our house cool as the daytime temps are now getting into the 80’s. I still think it’s running far to often, and not cooling as fast as it should, but we’ll get that squared away soon.

The new Thermostat (A RadioThermostat/Filtrete CT-80) has a great API which allows me not only to control the thermostats functions and programming, but also display some basic information to the screen. I coded up a quick test of this over the weekend, and I really like what I’m going to be able to do with it:

I was also able to start logging my first wave of data, which will show you pretty clearly how drastically temperatures vary in our house sometimes. With this data, the thermostat is set to 72 (and is pretty close to that reading downstairs). The 2 lines are link’s bedroom (red, across the hall from my office), and my office (blue). My office gets the morning sun, which is part of the reason it shoots up faster… but what the sun doesn’t do, my PC takes care of when I turn it on. In fact, the temps in the photo of the thermostat are accurate (84, 76, and 72…)

In any case, I’m hoping that the remaining temperature sensors come in the mail later today and that I get some time tonight to wire them all up. If they do, I should be in a pretty good position to start logging the temperature from pretty much every room possibly as early as tomorrow. Then it will be on to phase 2… Coming up with solutions to reduce the power consumption, while increase the cooling… Whole Home Fan Anyone?

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