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I have a geothermal HVAC system, and it's not very well designed. If the loop temperatures drop below a certain point it becomes ineffective, and I need to man
by mos1 17y ago
I have a geothermal HVAC system, and it's not very well designed. If the loop temperatures drop below a certain point it becomes ineffective, and I need to manually switch to a secondary heat source.
In a single afternoon, I was able to hook some one-wire sensors into the loops, attach them to a widget that made the sensor data available via IP, write a daemon that monitors the temperature, and then automatically notifies the IP-enabled thermostat to flip over to secondary heat if the loops go below effective temperatures, and to flip back when they recover.
The next day, I made it so the loop temperatures were recorded and graphed, and that I receive an SMS alert if there's a complete HVAC failure (loops too cold + secondary heat failure).
That was some awesome tinkering.
- DaniFong 17y agoImpressive. It might be very interesting to chat. I'd appreciate if you dropped me an email to dfong <a.t> lightsailenergy.com :-)
- joshu 17y agoSame. What was the widget? Been thinking of hiring someone to do some board layout work to build these.
- mos1 17y agoIt's just an off-the-shelf Barix Barionet 50. It does the job well, and only draws a watt or two (literally). Not terribly impressive, but $150 worth of my own work wouldn't have been able to drop the power usage to those levels.