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Home Assistant is open source home automation that puts local control and privacy first. Powered by a worldwide community of tinkerers and DIY enthusiasts. Perfect to run on a Raspberry Pi or a local server. Available for free at home-assistant.io

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Automating a window AC (lemmy.zip)

submitted 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) by shortwavesurfer@lemmy.zip to c/homeassistant@lemmy.world

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So I have my AC connected to a smart plug and I'm trying to figure out what would be the best way to go about automating it.

Currently, I have it set to run every hour on the hour for 20 minutes if the time is between noon and 8 p.m. Which covers the hottest part of the day.

However, what I could do is have it run every other hour instead and have a couple of night runs along with the daytime runs.

Doing it that way would eliminate most of the 16-hour period currently that exists between the ending of one day and the beginning of the next.

Edit: Also, is there an easy way to automate every other hour using the time pattern or would I manually have to set up triggers for 2am, 4am, 6am, 8am, 10am, etc. using the fixed values?

Edit 2: looks like i can use "/2" to accomplish that

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[–] jaharkes@lemmy.world 1 points 6 days ago (3 children)

I have window AC units in my kids bedrooms. They stay off during the day, but turn on several hours before bedtime depending on the outside temperature. It isn't a terribly smart automation, just a "turn on at 4pm if temp over 100F, 5pm for 90F and 6pm for 80F."

Originally I was trying to do it based on delta t between the room and the outside and the target temperature and the estimated cooling efficiency, then I had to start figuring in how humidity and feels like temperature would affect things. And so after over thinking and over engineering it, I ended up at the stupid solution of just switching on at fixed times based on outside temperature being over a threshold and it works pretty well.

[–] mweiss@infosec.exchange 1 points 5 days ago

@jaharkes @shortwavesurfer yep. You start there and see if it's good enough, and then iterate. That way you're not overengineering it. The more inputs you use to have the automation decide things, the more opportunities there are for the automation to break.

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