Automating a vacation property from another country / Turn off AC automatically to save on electricity

Share your Projects!
21

Can you share Information or a link with information about using an external drive?

22

Also do bear in mind your guests can always override the ac control with the remote!

23

Yes, that’s fine. What we don’t want is people turning it on and leave windows and doors opened or AC running on an empty room/apartment. If an AC is turned off and people turn it on, it will shut off again if conditions are met:

  • HA will sense when the old “dumb” air conditioner units are running via Emporia Vue Energy Monitor and or room temperature sensor and on the new “wifi smart” unit, it will just gather the info via API
  • At anytime should a door or window be left open on that room for more than 3 minutes HA will switch off the AC.
  • Also will check the room for occupancy using the PIR sensors. When no occupancy has been detected after a pre-set time delay, a signal will be transmitted to the AC to switch it off.
  • On re-entering the room, if air conditioning is required, the occupant simply turns the air conditioner back on using the normal remote control as they normally would.
  • After the occupant has left the room, HA will continue to scan the room for a pre–set time, 15,30 or 60 mins before sending the signal to turn off the AC
  • During hours of darkness HA will not switch the AC off even if no movement is detected. (No accidental switch off’s with sleeping occupants).
  • If a person enters the room and closes the door behind them, provided HA detects their movement within 5 minutes it will be deemed that the room is occupied. Consequently the AC will be allowed to run for the duration, regardless of any further movement being detected. When the person exits the room and closes the door behind him, if no movement is detected in the room within 5 minutes, the room is now deemed as unoccupied and the AC will be switched “Off”.

If you have suggestions on how to improve the logic or if you think it will fail in certain conditions, please let me know.

24

If you use sensibo it reads the remote control so your ha system knows what the user has done ‘manually’. However it is cloud based, and you have already ordered your gear :wink:

Reliable presence detection is one of the biggest issues in home automation. It is easier to debug when you are there to see what is going on.

25

Thanks @nickrout It’s great to get more suggestions and new ideas!

Sensibo is $267 on sale for 3 units.

Using a propertary cloud base solution I might be able to integrate with HA and I might be able to know what people have pressed but on the other hand I will be limited to control just the AC with them. Also Sensibo cannnot seem to control additional items I may get in the future like companion ceiling fans with remote (I’ve read using AC along with a ceiling fan is a goo way to reduce energy because of the perceived temperature comfort is higher at higher temperatures)

I’ve paid $53 for 3 x Rm Mini and I will be able to control the TV and other things in the future.

To be honest, for the purpose of switching off the AC, I don’t really care about the specific current state of the AC, I can just send the OFF command even if it’s already OFF. One of the things I want to do is to set the temperature to a comfort temperature regardless of what people have choose. Since I also have temperature sensors, just after sensing the unit is on, I could set automatically a comfortable temperature having in mind outside temperature, current season and time of the day.

To know what the AC is doing, I will use the Energy Monitor that allows me to know the consumption on every circtuir on the house. So two birds with one stone there.

Sensibo seems to be a nice product but for the purpose of sending AC IR commands and to tell the current state of the air conditioning only, seems a bit expensive.

One of the reasons of going Home Assistance route is to be free to build my own strategy and logic around the house. Buying generic sensors and IR controllers seems like a better investment. Or at least I hope so.

For those interested. I’ve found other products to control AC over WiFi:

26

I have a pebbleair too. It is now retired as I didn’t like it. I bought it because I didn’t know much about home automation and my fujitsu vendor recommended it (and stiffed me on the price, you think the sensibo is expensive at $260 odd for 3 of them. Sheesh you haven’t met NZ resellers!) Anyway it needs a licensing fee every 3 years and mine ran out so I replaced it with a sensibo I had lying around.

The service from pebbleair was very good. When I had a problem the company proprietor was literally on the phone within a few minutes, about the time it took him to email me back and ask for my number, and me to respond to him. I can’t fault that aspect. Probably helps that it is developed locally in NZ and he was in the same timezone. While on the phone I got chatting to him about the (lack of) a public api and about home assistant. He seemed really interested and enthusiastic. I duly emailed him a whole lot of stuff about HA and the sales benefits an open api, either cloud or preferably local, would bring. Never heard a word back.

I did try to reverse engineer their cloud protocol. Pretty easy to get the packets from their app to their cloud server from my android phone, but I never worked out the authentication properly. Apathy stepped in. Not really into adding more cloud stuff to HA anyway.

Their app for setting time based schedules was rubbish, although it improved on an app update.

Anyway I would not choose pebbleair again. If anyone wants one, let me know (PM).

27

Room presence detection based on motion sensors is not that simple. What if somebody decides to lay down on the bed in the afternoon or just sits still watching TV or reading a book?

Maybe you could add a BLE tag to the room key, if somobody is in the room the key should be there as well I guess.

1 Like
28

Not necessarily. With Broadlink RM (if placed near the AC) you can capture the signals sent by the hardware IR remote (and translate these codes to state for the AC, for example by using MQTT HVAC); however, ASFAIK, Broadlink IR module doesn’t have a passive capture mode.

If your IR remote codes are already supported by the Arduino’s IRRemote library then you’ll be able to use OpenMQTTGateway IRtoMQTT function to passively receive IR codes into HA (over MQTT, but not only from AC, any IR remote for TV/audio receiver/cheap 16 color smart bulbs) and HA can monitor all the functions of the AC even if local IR remote is used (including the state, target temperature, fan, etc.) by forwarding MQTT payloads from the IRtoMQTT to the MQTT HVAC state topic. You would be able to fully sync the AC state with HA regardless of the control used; this should be available for most well known AC manufacturers.

If the AC manufacturer (which is the case for the more obscure ones) used an IR library not supported by Arduino IRRemote, then one can still use OpenMQTTGateway with an IR blaster to send Raw payloads to the AC (not ideal but it works). Although Raw IR payloads are received by HA I think it would be more complicated (but not impossible) to translate those into appropriate well-formed topics for AC for mode, temperature, fan, etc.

Alongside cost (in the range of 5 USD/EUR per unit), the advantage of the IR blaster&receiver DIY solution is that there won’t be any home calling (although the router you have bought can block the internet access for the Broadlink, but still be able to use HA to control it).

For presence sensor there might be need to a couple of different technologies such as PIR, BLE tracking, bed occupancy (Bed occupancy DIY sensor), microwave sensor (Presence sensor V2 - microwave RF sensors - #21 by Klagio)

29

:roll_eyes: seriously??? I don’t think guest will appreciate their nightly bed activities being monitored (or during the day :wink:)

30

May I ask why not?

Except for BLE tracking, there are probably low chances of motion sensors (at least not with PIR; a microwave sensor might be more accurate) to identify presence while laying on bed/sofa.

31

Fair enough :slight_smile:

Anyway, the sensor should track the occupancy over a period of time, ignoring spikes :slight_smile:

32

Room presence detection based on motion sensors is not that simple. What if somebody decides to lay down on the bed in the afternoon or just sits still watching TV or reading a book?

If anybody enters the room and closes the door behind him, movement will be sensed while going to bed or while laying down. Since no door sensor is opened after that, then presence status won’t change, therefore AC won’t be turned off.

If the door is left opened with the AC on, the AC will turn off after 3 minutes.

Maybe you could add a BLE tag to the room key, if somobody is in the room the key should be there as well I guess.

We provide 2 pair of keys so that won’t work.
I also thought about checking devices connected to the router, but people could leave their phones and leave, so that won’t work either.

33

Like the man said, it ain’t simple :slight_smile:

34

Not necessarily. With Broadlink RM (if placed near the AC) you can capture the signals sent by the hardware IR remote (and translate these codes to state for the AC, for example by using MQTT HVAC); however, ASFAIK, Broadlink IR module doesn’t have a passive capture mode.

I hope I can do that. I will try that once I get them and start playing with it.

If your IR remote codes are already supported by the Arduino’s IRRemote library then you’ll be able to use OpenMQTTGateway IRtoMQTT function to passively receive IR codes into HA (over MQTT, but not only from AC, any IR remote for TV/audio receiver/cheap 16 color smart bulbs) and HA can monitor all the functions of the AC even if local IR remote is used (including the state, target temperature, fan, etc.) by forwarding MQTT payloads from the IRtoMQTT to the MQTT HVAC state topic. You would be able to fully sync the AC state with HA regardless of the control used; this should be available for most well known AC manufacturers.

I hope I’ll learn about Arduino/ESP/433 circuits sometime in the future. I think that’s the smart way to build everything yourself, having fun and saving money in the process. Unfortunately I don’t have much time to experiment with it right now, but I’m enjoying reading about it.

Regarding presense detection, since I’m using the logic of the doors and motion sensors combined, I think it’s ok for the purpose. Worst case scenario, I might wrongly turn the AC off while somebody is in there, so the person simply will turn it back on with the remote and given no door is opened after that, then the AC will remain ON until a door is opened with no motion sensed afterwards.

35

Are these “doors” you speak of between rooms in the apartment, or are they doors to the outside world (and the outside weather)?

Also, Brazil? Hot and humid? Is it fair to be able to let the (presumably paying) guests have the room cool when they get back from a day of sightseeing? Do you want them to have the ability to turn the AC on half an hour before they get back? I know that when I stay in an AirBNB (for example) I’d be peeved that the landlord turned off the AC while I was at the beach. I’d also feel guilty about leaving it on all day given we’d all like to save the world.

36

This sounds like a good GDPR use case ; -)

37

I think all can do the job, you should find existing discussions on the subject.

38

This sounds like I need to update a blog post I did several years ago. I will post it here when done.

39

Are these “doors” you speak of between rooms in the apartment, or are they doors to the outside world (and the outside weather)?

A door for each bedroom and the door of the living room is the front door to the outside weather. Each room has an independent wall AC unit.

Also, Brazil? Hot and humid? Is it fair to be able to let the (presumably paying) guests have the room cool when they get back from a day of sightseeing? Do you want them to have the ability to turn the AC on half an hour before they get back? I know that when I stay in an AirBNB (for example) I’d be peeved that the landlord turned off the AC while I was at the beach. I’d also feel guilty about leaving it on all day given we’d all like to save the world.

If you go to any fancy and expensive hotel in the world, the room key has to be inserted to have electricity in the room, if you leave the room, everything turns off.

Even if you don’t care about the environmental effects of consuming more electricity than you need, take into account that in Brazil the electricity is really expensive. Last month I paid USD$400 just in electricity bills. And having a long time experience hosting people, we know a lot of people just don’t care and we have even seen people with all the doors and windows opened and AC running so they can smoke inside the house :scream_cat: (which is also forbidden by rules btw)

Having an AC turned on fighting the harsh Brazilian weather in an empty room, so you just don’t feel instantaneous cold temperatures after returning from the beach isn’t the right thing to do as a guest and as a human being. An AC takes 5-10 minutes to cool the room to a comfortable temperature.

If anyone here is the kind of guest who feels the right to do so because you have paid your room, please stop. You wouldn’t do that if you were the owner of the house, so just don’t do that to others please :wink:

1 Like
40

I agree with all of that.

Turning it on half an hour before you get back might be acceptable, which was my suggestion. But you have my support on everything you say!