Re: [mh] General HVAC questions

[Karl S. <kar...@gm...>]

Dustin,

I figured I'll toss in my two cents on the Omnistat.  I just got the
Omnistat2, RC-1000 model, working with MH.  Everything you can do on the
thermostat itself can be controlled via MH.  However if you have a HDD
failure, like I did this week, the furnace keeps running.  The Omnistat2's
can have a different program for everyday of the week, not just weekday,
saturday and sunday, with a morning, day, evening, and night setting.  One
really nice feature I like about the Omnistat2 is the ability to cycle the
fan for x minutes out of every 20 minutes.  I live in an older house in Ohio
so during the Spring and Fall when the A/C or furnace are not running at all
I can still get air moving through my house.  The Omnistat can be set to
auto mode to flip between heat and cool depending on what the house needs.
With additional temp sensors it can average temperatures.  If you are going
to get a whole house humidifier the RC-2000 can control that also.  If you
live somewhere where energy cost vary depending on the time of day the
Omnistat can automatically adjust set points base on this.  Does not require
batteries, runs off the 24VAC from the furnace.  And also their customer
support is very good.  I had issues getting serial communication working.  I
told them what was going on and without asking questions they gave me a RA
number and within a week of sending the defective one out I had a new
thermostat.

Hope that helps some.

Karl

On Wed, Dec 29, 2010 at 10:12 AM, Dustin Robinson <re...@du...> wrote:

> Thanks again to everyone!!!
>
> Eloy:  I already have plans to put a ridiculous quantity of cat6 in
> the new house.  I put "too much" in this house and I'm already short
> in some locations.  Luckily the house is small and cat5 boxes are big.
>  The real solution I think will be good access and infrastructure to
> add more cabling.  Not only as you mentioned cabling conduit to the
> attic from the basement, but also from the wall boxes to the basement.
>  This way I can easily add what ever is in fad (like fiber or whatever
> comes out next week) to any location in the house.
>
> Joel:  Being a tinkerer at heart I'm sure I will never have it figured
> out and it will never be complete, much to the chagrin of my wife.
> What I am trying to do is get a grasp for what works well so that I
> can make educated decisions about what infrastructure requirements I
> will have.  I have so far determined that the Insteon price tag is
> worth it for the performance and reliability vs X10, based on what I
> am seeing in my small network.  I have also found 1Wire to be cost
> effective and simple solution.
>
> Joel/Greg/William: I agree with the separate device controlling HVAC
> from a reliability standpoint.  Its also something I worry about as
> far as getting too invested in MH.   My reason for leaning toward
> software control of the HVAC at the moment is that I have a rotating
> schedule where my days off continually change.  I like to set back the
> thermostat when no one is home and the Monday-Friday programs
> available in the commercial packages just don't cut it.  It may just
> be something I have to get over but I was thinking of working toward
> determining the heating cycle based on our gmail calender schedules.
> What dose the omnistat (or other) get me that my current programmable
> thermostat doesn't do.  Its a pretty big price tag on something that I
> don't really understand the benefit of.
>
> William:  It is amazing how fast the changes come about.  What used to
> struggle on 4 compaq proliant 1850R's with a huge storage array in a
> six foot tall cabinet now screams on a little 1u atom box tacked to
> the wall in the corner.  The proliants used to be the heat source for
> my old apartment and the new unit including UPS, switches, modems an
> all, consumes less than 100 watts.
>
> Marc:  Again a big thank you for taking the time to write so much!
> Its always such a pain to write about something that you have already
> figure out but it really helps out the rest of us.  Your instructions
> are awesome!
>
> After all this time struggling to get the temp data into MH what is
> the benefit?  Is there any reason other than the graphs and web
> interface?  Realistically I am the only one who will ever look at this
> stuff so log files and rrdtool work fine for me.  Is there something I
> am missing that mh can do for me?
>
>
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