I was hoping that someone might be interested in extending the Generic Thermostat class.
I have an Evaporative Cooler. Basically this is a large 750w fan for the house that draws air from outside.
The cooler draws the air through a set of wet pads. This adds humidity to the air, and in the process it drops the temperature of the outside air.
These systems are very efficient in places that have high temp, low humidity.
These systems are poor in high humidity environments, as you cant add any more water to the air… you don’t get a drop in temp.
There are a few quirks that need to be catered for:
You don’t run these for less than 10 minutes, as it typically takes 2-3 min to wet the pads. Some systems will dump the water when turning off (so that you don’t get bacteria etc). So you don’t start/stop them. Stopping them will be at the expense of a fair bit of water.
You run these coolers for long periods, and use the fan speed to moderate the temp. I have found that the temp will not drop below 24deg C no matter how hard you push the fan. So as the temperature reaches the target it is better to slow the fan down (not turn the system off).
I cant see in the existing Generic Thermostat how you could regulate the fan speed. It seems to just have a hard ON/OFF with some nice additional features to help with overshooting/undershooting the target, or allowing some additional grace time.
Any thoughts on what I should do to attempt to control this?
I love this; I’ve been thinking about the same thing. There is also this guy that made a custom sensor component to determine when to switch between AC and Evap, if you haven’t seen it already. Not what you’re looking for but maybe useful as a side project or an additional feature. It might be useful to make a similar custom sensor component for your idea:
What brand and model of cooler do you have? Where do you live in the world? In western USA we have a few days above 40C every summer, with average humidity around 25%. Control of my unit amounts to three control points: pump on/off and fan speed high/low/off. I don’t know for sure, but I think it’s important that the high and low are not on at the same time. This could be critical for HA to keep straight so the motor is not destroyed.
I’m not much help in the development side yet but I do have python experience. I’m very new to Home Assistant still but I have a lot of ideas for how to pimp a swamp cooler.
I have experimented with turning the water pump on and off to control the temperature of the incoming air with pretty good results and without changing the fan speed. This is most beneficial in the spring and summer when the incoming air temp can get low in the evening and chill parts of the house too quickly. Mostly a complaint from my girlfriend. If I just turn the fan speed down then the rooms far from the vent get too hot and others too cold.