I've spent some time the past few days to get INDIGOplotD working and tweaked, so I thought I'd show off the fruits of my labor. Thanks to Karl for the support in debugging a couple issues to get it working right!
My motivation was to be able to visualize the effect of using my whole house fans, which are the whole reason I got started with Indigo and HA in the first place. I have 3 QuietCool fans mounted in the attic, targeting 3 distinct areas of the house, moving 5100 CFM when all 3 are running. The question though is always, when to use them versus when to run the AC. I want to be able to answer questions like: Why does it feel warm even with the fans on sometimes? What to do in the morning -- run fans to keep the attic cooler and give us a breeze, or is that just going to hasten the heating of the house? On a warm afternoon when it's starting to feel toasty even with all fans running, bite the bullet and switch to AC, or is relief around the corner? In the evening, when is the right time to change from AC to fans?
I figured that by plotting temp and humidity of key areas, I could get a better handle on these things. So I'm taking inputs from the Insteon thermostat in the living room and Zooz ZSE40 sensors in the attic and outside the home. Attic is mainly for curiosity -- I don't think that's really affecting the living areas since I had the attic insulation redone recently.
- climate control plot - test-minute-S2.png (310.99 KiB) Viewed 2942 times
For each sensor, temp is the 2px (heavier) line, and humidity is the 1px (lighter) line. The orange line is the luminance reading from the outdoor sensor. The sensor is intended to be used indoors, so daylight pegs it at 100%. This is fine with me, all I really want is an indication of when sunrise and sunset happened.
For the filled areas, I used a setting of 80% transparency. Each of the 3 fans gets its own curve, and when you draw them all on the same graph, you get dark green for 1 fan running, medium green for 2 fans, and light green for 3 fans. Since the AC and heat tend to toggle on and off rather frequently when they're running, I am using a 5-minute moving average so that their data plot really represents the duty cycle over the past 5 minutes. You can see that on Wednesday when it was pretty hot, my poor ancient AC unit ran for about 4 hours straight.
Fun observations:
- The outside temp isn't quite right.. It reads about 10 degrees high on sunny days due to the sensor's location. I need to find a way to take the min of 2 temp sensors and use that as The Truth for outside temp.
- Monday around 11 AM, I turned on one fan. It's funny to see the attic temp plummet, and then spike back up when the fan turned off.
- I generally leave one fan running when I go to bed, to get a gentle breeze and cool down the house a bit. A trigger is set to turn it off once the temp drops below 72. You can see that happen at around Tuesday 3 AM, Wednesday 4:00 AM, Thursday 3:30 AM, Friday 3 AM. Sometimes it happens around midnight instead, depending on conditions.
- Attic temp came close to 110 on Wednesday. I've seen it over 120 on other days, and we haven't had a really hot day yet this season. Will be interesting to see what the attic temp is on a really hot, cloudless day!
- I plan to put sensors in additional rooms, but probably won't add those lines to this already-busy plot. Likely I'll make a copy of this plot "device" in Indigo, and experiment with that.
A couple other things.
This plot updates every minute. I created a control page and set this image as its background so I can easily view it any time. But since the Indigo Touch iOS app caches images, I find it easier to bring it up in a web browser instead (http://your.server.IP:8176) if I want to obsessively check it.
My main plot captures 7 days of data, rather than the 5 days I show in this image. I created an Automator "Calendar Alarm" that runs every Saturday at 11:50 PM to make a copy of the current 7-day plot, move it to an archive directory, and append its filename with the current date. So eventually I'll have a nice historical archive of week-by-week plots.
I hope someone found this interesting!
Matt
