Does anyone out there have any experience with the Venstar t7900 thermostat with regard to HA integration?
Hi Dave,
Just noticed your post. Yes, I have HA running the Venstar integration with the T7900, but really only using HA for trending and event analysis at this time.
What I’ve found with the T7900 since HA has come on the scene is rather concerning …
Earlier this summer while I was outside working near our home’s HVAC condensor/compressor unit, I thought it seemed to run a bit of a short cycle sometimes. Having moved my Insteon controls to HA earlier this year after the servers went offline, I had also added the Venstar integration - not for control, but just because I could.
The relevant parts of the thermostat configuration are as follows:
- Maximum Cycles Per Hour No Limit
- Minimum Compressor Off Time 5 Minutes
- First Stage Deadband 1˚F / 0.5˚C
- Fan Off Delay 120 Seconds
- Smart Recovery Enabled
- Compressor Stages 1 stages
- Cool Stages 1 stages
- Dehumidify Setpoint 44%
- Run AC to Dehumidify Enabled
- Maximum Overcool 2
- Dehumidify Only when Cooling Enabled
In this area, we frequently see the AC kick in to pull out the humidity - not only for temperature control.
Given my casual observation, I started poking around the Venstar history in HA. I started to see that there were many times when the compressor would only run for only 1 minute and 9 seconds or so. Not good. Especially when Venstar had assured me that there was a 2 minute Minimum On cooling timer in the thermostat to prevent such things.
I then added the history explorer custom card so that I could export data to a .csv file for Excel analysis. Additional entities were added to provide history for some unhistorized attributes.
Reviewing the data revealed that the AC would would trigger on high humidity and the Maximum Overcool setting will prematurely terminate the Minimum On cooling timer in the thermostat. Feeding this back to Venstar, they commented that they would make a ticket for this for future firmware updates. Not the best response, but there it is.
I have since changed the unlimited cooling cycles per hour to 6 and will be monitoring this as long as the indoor humidity and warm temperatures permit and see what else I can dig up.
In the mean time, I wanted to pass this observation along with the hopes of preventing anyone in the community to not experience a compressor failure due to too frequent short cycles of the compressor.
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I recently installed a couple Explorer T4800s and just checked the deadband settings in the mobile app for the first time. It looks like the cycles per hour is set to 6 by default on mine. My firmware version is 2.22.