I’d like to monitor the performance of my furnace and A/C. Also I’d like to explore the capabilities of HA. And I very much love to analyze data.
Bringing this all together, I’d like to see a plot of how efficiently my house is heating (or cooling) and trigger alerts if it’s performing poorly.
For example, if the front door is open and it is taking longer to heat the house, or if the furnace igniter is not working and the call for heat is active but the house is not warming up, I’d like to be made aware of those scenarios.
Here’s the steps I’m thinking, to be executed after each cycle of heat or cooling is finished:
- Determine how long the furnace was heating (or cooling)
- Determine the indoor temperature delta during the cycle
- Calculate the temp change rate (e.g. °F/min)
- Determine the average outside temperature during the cycle
- Record a data point for x=outside avg temp, y=temp change rate
- Update a trend line (linear or polynomial regression) based on those data points
Once the data set is mature enough, I’d want to implement the alert functionality:
After a predefined duration during a call for heat (or cooling), I’d like to
A. Compare the in process heating/cooling rate data point to the trend line calculated in #6
B. If error is greater than a predetermined amount, trigger a notification
Technically all the data I need for this analysis already exists in the recorder and could be exported to tools I’m familiar with (such as Excel or Matlab) for parsing and analysis, but obviously the benefit of HA is automation.
This will obviously be a lot of work to implement. I’m looking for some high level suggestions on how to attack it. As I think through options, I’m coming up with solutions for only part of the problem and it is essentially a large number of template sensors (they’d all contain float values, updated upon the completion of each call for heat or cool)
So even once those sensors are implemented, I’m lost as to how I could analyze the data and feed it back into an automation.
I’m open to all methods and tools (node red, grafana, etc) so looking for some pointers on how to attack this. I hope the real benefit of creating this is for me to learn more about HA, as opposed to just implementing a notification. So comments such as “go read about X” are most definitely appreciated.