I live in a house with a separate basement apartment. The thermostat is in the upstairs unit, and the whole house shares forced air heat (no AC). I have Ecobee3 with sensors - but the basement heats up much faster than the upstairs.
I plan to buy Keen vents for just the basement (upstairs will never get too hot as it’s a 100+ year old house with no insulation). I understand all the DTH’s/smartapps I need but I want to know if there is a way to give the basement tenant access to just the basement heat in a user friendly way, but not access to the rest of the ST apps for the house. The Keen app looks good, but would it still work if connected to ST?
The keen Home app only works when the vents are connected to their bridge. You cannot pair the vents to both ST and the Keen Home Bridge.
To my knowledge, under ST, there is no way to let your tenant control her/his own temperature settings as you have only 1 thermostat in the house.
You can however use the ecobeeSetZoneWithSchedule smartapp to input a temp delta (+/-) between your upstairs and downstairs zones so that the downstairs zone’ vents would be closed sooner when heating the house.
I’ve just released new major versions of my zoned heating/cooling solutions (ecobeeSetZoneWithSchedule & ScheduleTstatZones v8.0 ) and ScheduleTempControl (v4.0) with the option to create new virtual Zone Devices under ST for easier control of your targeted heating/cooling zones inside your home!!
The new versions of my zoned heating/cooling smartapps (ecobeeSetZoneWithSchedule v8.0.3, ScheduleTstatZones v8.0.3, ScheduleRoomTempControl v4.0.3) provide the following new features:
They can now process the motion events in real time (according to your sensor’s refresh rate) for your virtual zone(s)
You can now set a delay in seconds before setting the vents when your HVAC is running (heating,cooling, fan only).
Hello,
I have setup the Smart Vent Manager app and it all seems to be working well. I am using a Nest thermostat and I have eight rooms with Keen smart vents and a temp sensor in seven of the rooms. The eighth room uses the Nest thermostat s its temp sensor.
One question I have is that even though a specific room is falling below its threshold, (for example, the room is getting colder that the threshold value), the app doesn’t trigger the thermostat to initiate the HVAC system to start up. Is this correct? Only when the room where the thermostat is located gets cold enough to trigger the thermostat does the HVAC heating start up.
Also, I am getting some errors that I hope you can help out with. The errors I am getting are:
Nest Manager API CMD Failed:
The (Device Poll async) CMD sent to the API has failed.
Status Code: 429
Nest Manager API Issue Warning:
Your API connection is currently being Rate-limited for excessive commands.
Those issues are related to the Nst Manager, not my smartapp. Please contact the Nst Manager’s author
to solve those issues.
As far as my smartapp is concerned, it will not trigger your HVAC as this basic smartapp does not allow to control your setpoints, only your vents.
If you want to control your vents AND your setpoints, you’d need to contribute to one of my zoned heating/cooling smartapps at my store (as indicated in my previous posts to you).
Using this Smart Vent Manager, how often do you adjust the vents? I know that the adjusting is only done when the thermostat is actually heating or cooling, but do you continually adjust the vents while the HVAC is not idle? For example, if I have a threshold in a room that is higher than the room temperature, when the HVAC comes on, the vent will open. My question is, if the room temperature reaches the threshold for that room, and is still running, will this app close the vent in that room, since it already reached is temperature threshold? I am hoping, and assume it does since once a room hits its threshold, and the HVAC is still running, if the vent is left open, that room would get very warm, or cool, until the HVAC goes idle.
How often do you poll the room temperature(s) to adjust the room vent(s) when the HVAC is running?
As indicated in the 1st post of this thread, this basic smartapp will only adjust the vents
when your HVAC is running (not idle). So, if the room’s ambient temp reaches the threshold, the vent will be closed.
If you don’t input a thermostat (optional), the smartapp will compare the vents’ internal temp with the ambient temp to close/open the vents
My paid smartapps at my store will poll the thermostat for you every 5 minutes (cycle of 5 minutes). Also, if you want more frequent vent adjutments, the paid smartapps have the option to adjust the vents every 5 minutes in ScheduleSetup>VentSettings.
The smartapp will probably close the vent the next time the HVAC is running, not during the same cycle. It also depends on your HVAC cycle (short or long).
With 8 vents, I’d recommend to install one of the DTHs posted in the 1st post of this thread as you will likely generate a lot of polling to your Nest Thermostat with the stock ST Keen Home DTH (the default one that is paired with your vents).
Also, you’d get more predictable results with the smartapps at my store as those smartapps were designed for large homes in mind. I personnally have 16 vents at my place and they all are orchestrated the way it should with the concept of “zones”. This concept of zones is missing in this basic smartapp.
So I got my first Keen vent. I see tons of polling of the temp with the basic built in device handler, so I tried both of the ones at the beginning of this thread. They install just fine, but with both of them, when I click the Configure tile, nothing happens. I just want to reduce the polling. What am I missing?
… I am just learning…so it may not be “polling” but rather that the Keen vent is reporting its’ temperature every time it changes…? Not sure, I just see lots of messages in the Notifications…Activity Feed with temp reports. Do I care? is all this reporting (or polling?) adding traffic to my Zigbee network? I only plan on adding one more Keen vent, so I am not worried about my furnace being taxed by lots of vents being closed, so I really dont need constant reporting of the temp of the vent.
Hi, with any ST z-wave or zigbee devices under ST, when you click the “configure” tile, nothing happens in the UI, but a new configuration is sent for this device. If you have multiple vents, you’d need to do it for every vent.
So, if you’ve pressed the tile, the vent should be reporting the pressure & temp less less often than the original stock device (every 10 minutes or when there is a variation of 1F) instead of every minute or so. So basically, you’ve reduced the traffic by a factor of 10.
There is no other option for controlling the traffic unless you change the settings yourself under the configure method in the DTH. There are instructions on how to do it in the comments.
Most people are satisfied with the new settings.
And, finally, some reporting needs to happen so that ST doesn’t consider your vent to be “offline”.
@yvesracine Hi there, I’ve been using Keenect for some time and love it but have noticed recently that the vents aren’t responding to the open commands. I can open using the SmartThings app manually but Keenect no longer seems to drive them. I am wondering if anything has changed on the Smartthings side and if you’re app is seeing similar issues ?
On an unrelated note I’ve also seen (since most recent Smarthings firmware updates) that sometimes these vents will just flash when the Smartthings hub goes offline and seemingly won’t reconnect until I pull the battery and push the button once (not a full reset of the vent).
Are you (or anyone here) seeing these similar issues ?
I don’t support Keenect and to my knowledge nobody does anymore, so I cannot tell you what’s wrong.
My solutions work and are used by many contributors all over North America and Europe.
If you have disconnect issues, you may want to add a Keen Home Bridge as a zigbee repeater to your ST mesh network. I’ve already posted how to do this in the ST community forum, so you just need to look it up.
BTW, my solutions can do much more than Keenect for the price of few cups of coffee…For example, you can now create virtual zone devices that you may use for applying a temp delta (+/-) to colder/hotter zoned rooms.
