All,

I wrote up an article on the wiki about the system I'm using to control my thermostats to help reduce energy usage. Let's use this thread for any questions/comments/improvements to that system. I'm also linking to this thread from the wiki post for easier access.

Jay,

I have 5 thermostats in the house that I replaced with the Venstar 7 day with Insteon control. So I thought the 7 day would work well with programming and basically run things on their own. Long story short, "tending" the thermostats -- we get power outages here, and the thermostats lose their time -- as well as the wife wanting to change the time and temp settings, is a bit of a chore.

I spent a couple of hours setting up my system with your new script. It works like a charm! I have 5 settings throughout the day for M-F, and also Sat and Sun. These are for wake up (1 hr before wakeup warms the bedrooms and kitchen), mid morning (bedrooms drift), afternoon (computer room on for the kids), bedtime (1 hr prior to lights out warms bedrooms and begins to drift the family room) and night (at 12:30 AM everything drifts). The schedules let the zone temps drift pretty substantially, which hopefully will result in some energy savings. Your system is a huge improvement in programming a house vs trying to keep pressing the "program" button on these thermostats.

The variables appear on the iPhone too, so I can see what's up.

This is a great writeup and by itself is an excellent primer on how to do things with Indigo. With this level of control, a user can simply buy the one day thermostats--the savings over the seven day will help pay for the software itself. Thank you for your efforts!

Ham

hamw wrote:This is a great writeup and by itself is an excellent primer on how to do things with Indigo. With this level of control, a user can simply buy the one day thermostats--the savings over the seven day will help pay for the software itself. Thank you for your efforts!

Ham

Thanks. I'm glad someone else has tried it out. It's a bit complex, but I think it's solving a pretty complex problem so in that respect I think it's a win.

So simple and yet so powerful. Thanks for posting this.

I just bought my Venstar Insteon v2 adapter last week and got it installed. I have installed the Venstor Plugin to track how often my AC runs during the day. I found this article a few days ago and am going to try it out (hopefully this weekend). The article has an excellent how to for configuration.

The only thing that I have done so far with the setup is to have a register fan turn on/off when the AC comes on.

I'm very happy with it. Not only can you make a general schedule, you can set up action groups to trigger settings and update variables,such as when you go on vacation, have guests over etc.

Does this script still work with Indigo 5 or is there a better way of accomplishing the same thing?

Works great with Indigo 5. I personally don't know of anything better. Give it a try and let us know what you think.

I've been using this script with great success for quite a while, but I found an issue that I would like to resolve. We were away on a family vacation for a week and I used Indigo Touch to check on things at home each evening. I noticed the variables knew we were "away," but the lighting and thermostat modes were set as if we were home. I think they didn't come up as LightingAway instead of LightingHome is because there was no variable change to trigger those modes when the schedule changes from day to evening, etc. So, basically, I think my scheduled changes to the variable "home" are triggering the script to adjust my lighting and thermostat properly, but home shouldn't even be a factor, since housemode is set to "away."

I'm guessing I'm missing some conditionals somewhere in my plan.

Recheck your config - there are a lot of moving parts so it's easy to get one slightly wrong. I've had this script running my house for about 3 years now. I just confirmed - if i change my houseMode to vacation then change the home variable, nothing happens.