Previously I had been using a cobbled together combination of AverageThings temperature sensors, a custom modified Keep Me Cozy II and Thermostat Mode Director, I just bought ScheduleTstatZones hoping to eliminate most if not all of these and have a better integrated solution. Unfortunately I’m not sure my use case works out of the box. Here are a few issues I noticed when trying to set it up yesterday:
###Using modes to define temperatures:
Previously I set my temperatures based on mode, of which I have three. Home, Night, and Away. I don’t have any scheduling configured on my thermostats and don’t do any scheduling via smartapps. The only place I have schedules defined are in the routines which change modes. In ScheduleTstatZones you can use modes, but you also have to have a schedule defined. In my opinion the schedule could be optional if using particular modes. To dance around this I made three schedules one for each mode and set the start time to 0:00 and 23:59 for each. In my mind this would accomplish the same thing.
Oddly though when switching modes ScheduleTstatZones would log the following for a fairly long period of time before picking up the mode change:
04f710c6-1cab-431a-9142-74d9b1b4b40d 8:55:02 PM: info schedule Night:avg temp= 63.0,main Tstat's currentTemp= 70.0,temp adjustment=7.0
04f710c6-1cab-431a-9142-74d9b1b4b40d 8:55:01 PM: info rescheduleIfNeeded>scheduling takeAction in 5 minutes..
04f710c6-1cab-431a-9142-74d9b1b4b40d 8:55:01 PM: info initialize>scheduling setZoneSettings every 5 minutes to check for zone settings to be applied
04f710c6-1cab-431a-9142-74d9b1b4b40d 8:52:31 PM: info setZoneSettings>No schedule applicable at this time 2016-11-05 20:52
04f710c6-1cab-431a-9142-74d9b1b4b40d 8:52:31 PM: info setZoneSettings>No schedule applicable at this time 2016-11-05 20:52
...
04f710c6-1cab-431a-9142-74d9b1b4b40d 8:12:31 PM: info setZoneSettings>No schedule applicable at this time 2016- 11-05 20:12
04f710c6-1cab-431a-9142-74d9b1b4b40d 8:12:31 PM: info setZoneSettings>No schedule applicable at this time 2016-11-05 20:12
04f710c6-1cab-431a-9142-74d9b1b4b40d 8:07:31 PM: info schedule Home,in zones=[1:Living Space],heating setPoint now =67.0,adjusted by avg temp diff (1.0) between all temp sensors in zone
###My thermostat is physically in a different zone
My second issue is related to the way my house is set up. I added a second physical zone after the fact, so now my upstairs and downstairs are two different zones with two different thermostats. The catch is both thermostats are physically located upstairs. I’ve always relied upon a remote sensor downstairs to turn things on and off because in the winter the upstairs will plenty warm while downstairs will be cold. I modified Keep My Cozy II to always setHeatingSetpoint to currentTemperature + 2 and keep it that way until the remote sensor reads the desired temperature for downstairs. ScheduleTstatZones doesn’t seem to work this way. I’ve set the max differential to 1F. Looking at the logs I see things like:
04f710c6-1cab-431a-9142-74d9b1b4b40d 7:32:27 PM: info schedule Home,in zones=[1:Living Space],heating setPoint now =67.0,adjusted by avg temp diff (1.0) between all temp sensors in zone
04f710c6-1cab-431a-9142-74d9b1b4b40d 7:32:27 PM: info schedule Home:avg temp= 65.0,main Tstat's currentTemp= 71.0,temp adjustment=6.0
So the desired temp is 66F. The current temp of the zone is 65F. The thermostat is currently reading 71F (because it’s upstairs). It looks like ScheduleTstatZones sets the thermostat to 67F trying to warm things up to the requested 66F, but of course that doesn’t do anything because the thermostate currently reads 71F. This seems broken to me, the thermostat should be set to 72F (and adjusted upwards as necessary in case the upstairs temp also increases) until the zone reaches 66F. Is my thinking wrong here? Obviously in the case of cooling the offset would be kept in the negative direction.
###More than one temp sensor in a room
ScheduleTstatZones already averages temperatures between zones for a given schedule. Unfortunately only a single sensor is supported per room. I can dance around this with VirtualThings, but it would be nice to be able to define multiple sensors in a room and average them together. This might also make good sense when using smart vents because you may have more than one vent per room.
###Turning the thermostat off when doors/windows are open
I know there are other smartapps which do this, but the problem is if you’re using an outdoor sensor to control the thermostat mode in ScheduleTstatZones that and the Door/Window smart app will fight for control of the mode. The Door/Window app may turn the thermostat off, but if ScheduleTstatZones noticed a change in the outdoor temperature it may switch to Heat/Cool until the other app has a chance to change it back and the battle continues.
It’s certainly possible that I’m just doing things wrong or perhaps this is was the wrong choice for my particular setup. Any help is greatly appreciated.
Robert