I wanted to see if anyone had come up with a way to do "ramping" profiles for bringing the heat up/AC down. The idea being instead of having the heat kick in at 4 am regardless to get the house from the "sleeping" temperature to the "wake up" temperature, the controller could look at the current temperature of the thermostat and the current outside temperature and ramp accordingly. I'm fine with working out what the curve/data points looks like manually (e.g. if it's 10F out and the house is 58F the house will warm up at 10 degrees/hour, so if the house needs to be at 66F by 5AM, turn the furnace on at 4:12 AM), but I'd like to avoid making a million scenes to cover all the combinations 1 at a time.
Has anyone done thermostat "ramping"?
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- Last Post 15 November 2013
rscott
posted this
15 November 2013
I wanted to see if anyone had come up with a way to do "ramping" profiles for bringing the heat up/AC down. The idea being instead of having the heat kick in at 4 am regardless to get the house from the "sleeping" temperature to the "wake up" temperature, the controller could look at the current temperature of the thermostat and the current outside temperature and ramp accordingly. I'm fine with working out what the curve/data points looks like manually (e.g. if it's 10F out and the house is 58F the house will warm up at 10 degrees/hour, so if the house needs to be at 66F by 5AM, turn the furnace on at 4:12 AM), but I'd like to avoid making a million scenes to cover all the combinations 1 at a time.
That's an interesting idea... why ramp it up though instead of just set it to a given temp? Does it save on energy costs?
One thing that seems like we'd be missing is the knowledge of how fast the house warms up. If it's 10F out, wouldn't you need to know how fast the system can warm the house by 10 degrees?
NFOtte
posted this
15 November 2013
That's an interesting idea... why ramp it up though instead of just set it to a given temp? Does it save on energy costs?
One thing that seems like we'd be missing is the knowledge of how fast the house warms up. If it's 10F out, wouldn't you need to know how fast the system can warm the house by 10 degrees?
You would need to figure out the rate your furnace can heat the house for a given exterior temperature range, but that shouldn't be hard to come by with logging turned on. I was figuring either I could leave it as configured (Heat turns up at 4 am), and simply watch the relationship over the course of the winter, or, once implemented, simply guess values, and then see how long it actually takes and use it as a positive feedback loop (again, watching the logging, "Oh, I thought it'd take 60 minutes when it's 10F, but the furnace turned off after 30 minutes").
It should save on energy costs, not quite to the magnitude of going from a simple temperature thermostat to a programmable, but I'm imagining it'll be noticeable. It should also help with comfort, as in, I like it cooooold for sleeping, so the longer the furnace stays down, the better I sleep. On the flip side, on the occasional day where it's stupid cold outside, maybe the furnace would need to come up before 4am to get the house warm enough.
