Some help to reduce impact of heat during summer

Summertime is (sometimes) period of high temperature that we are able to deal with or not.
The fact is that people living in south countries are better trained to take good action to keep their house cooled. What about people in the north ? Sometimes they are taking action that are the contrary to what should be done and are increasing room temperature 😕

The good reflexes

• close the windows during the day when outside temperature  is greater than house temperature
• close the blinds during the day, especially those south or west oriented
• fresh the rooms in the morning or evening when room temperature is above outside temperature by opening blinds and windows.

How home automation can help ?

Firstly, automation can manage  electric blinds. This part is not treated here, I don’t have this kind of equipment for the time being.

Smarthome controller can also help you to manage opening and closing of windows to keep fresh air or cool the house. We won’t install electric windows for that, but just have vocal alerts to remind us to do the right thing at the right moment.

An alert to cool a room at night

We’re going to configure eedomus controller to have it launch a vocal alert when a room have to be freshed. This alert will be activated only when we are in summer (heating is OFF), and in a certain period of time in the day (beginning of evening). Alert will be triggered based on room and outside temperature.

Let’s start to build the different blocks for this function to work.

Regarding vocal alerts, I won’t speak more than post Give a voice to smarthome setup.

We have also to deal with time period during which alerts can be triggered. Eedomus controller have a calendar that could be used for that. But generally it is used for other aspects (heating, blinds, …). I prefer to manage that period without the calendar feature.
For that matter, we create a virtual peripheral that will enable or not alerts. It’s containing 2 values : Alerts not activated or alerts activated

Two rules will modify this peripheral state in regards to time of the day. In my case, a first rule will select value “Alerts activated” at 6 PM, the second rule will select value “Alerts not activated” at 9PM. Those two rules should look like this :

Alert activation criterias contain also room temperature and outside temperature. For outside temperature, I’m using an oregon scientific probe which have a good accuracy  (look at this post). For the room temperatures they are mesured by  Eurotronic Stellaz thermostatic valves  that are forwarding temperature measurement every 20 minutes also during summertime. You can of course use other types of temperature probe.

The programming rule is simple, you shouldn’t need any explanation :

I’ve decided in this rule that alert will be activated only if room temperature is above 23°C.
Don’t forget also to limit retriggering of alert by setting a certain amount of time to “Allow retrigger” value, in order to prevent multiple vocal alerts.

To conclude, availability of door opening detector put on the windows should improve the feature, by preventing false alerts when window is already opened, and by repeating alert if window have not been opened as expected.