apostolakisl

No good tankless solutions. You can add a tank located closer to the other stuff and run a recirc pump between the tankless heater and the tank. You can't do recirc on tankless without adding a separate tank as this results in excess cycling of the heater. You can add a booster pump to get the water to the other side of the house faster. . . but you can't have the booster pump move too many gpm's or it will exceed the tankless capacity to heat the water. Basically the booster pump is near the point of use and it pumps water from the hot line to the cold line until it gets hot. For example, if there is 5 gallons of water in the pipes and your sink draws 2.5gpm. .. then it is 2 minutes to get water to the sink. If you add a pump that pumps 5gpm plus the sink at 2.5 gpm you drop the time down to about 45 seconds. But realize you are drawing 7.5gpm which may result in less than fully hot water. A system to turn the booster pump on at the right time is where the fun comes in. ISY can control that . . . but most people just have a button to turn it on. Once the hot water gets to the point of use the booster shuts off and doesn't turn on again until someone pushes the button. You can get fancy with other ways of turning the pump on using ISY.

I have cai webcontrol boards monitoring some stuff. I also have some of the lacrosse technology weather stations that log data. The version I have allows you to download the data and import to excel where you can do all kinds of fancy stuff with it. The latter choice is easier and cheaper, but the cai choice lets you put the data into the ISY as variable values in essentially real time.

My house was new construction. My office was a remodel which I just finished 3 weeks ago. My office had a bunch of roof vents which we mostly just boarded over. I had some of them boxed out with duct-board so the hvac guy could tap into them for fresh air and exhaust. I have one of those temp reader laser gun things. Last summer, I pointed it at a west facing roof at 6pm when it was 105 outside and sunny. The roof was 150 degrees. I went in the attic and pointed it at the same spot on the under surface and it was 87.

Of course the price point is very different here, but you might consider forgetting about venting the attic at all. Close up all the vents and spray foam the entire under side of the roof deck. This works awesome. I have both my house and office that way. If you have any hvac equipment/ducting in the attic it will work far better. Your attic will be much more temperate (mine goes from about 60 when it is 20 outside to about 85 when it is 105 outside) so you can actually use your attic for storage or have electronics operating in there. I promise you will see a sizable drop in your hvac bills. Also, no more fiberglass! Man I hate that stuff. And it seals way way better than any other technique. And when you do the roof deck you don't have to worry about leaks around all your ceiling fixtures. But back to the temp. I use a cai webcontrol unit and ioguy's program to log the temp readings every 5 minutes. It's a nice way to gather that data. You can also use some of the lacrossetechnology thermometers with a logging function and download that to a graph. Those are pretty cheap and work pretty well, I have one in my wine cellar, keg, and outside. I used it extensively to evaluate and adjust the hvac equipment in my wine room to optomize the tev settings.

Are you monitoring/logging/graphing your attic temp relative to fan status? I would be curious to see if the temp drops and by how much. Also!!!! be advised that if you do not have the attic/house interface tightly sealed, you may be sucking conditioned air out of the house with your attic fan and thus shooting yourself in the foot! You must have every crack sealed up (and that is hard to do) and you must have very adequate vents for air intake (so that the attic has minimal relative vacuum and is less inclined to suck from the house).

"Is there a way to programattically tell ISY that the Movie scene is no longer On?" Scenes do not have on/off status. But I think what you have is a program that runs in response to turning a scene on, so perhaps what you mean to say is that the program is "true". The way to make the program show "false" is to run the "else" clause. For example, 2 programs are triggered from x-10 and are mutually exclusive. Program 1 If x10 scene 1 is turned on Then set lights this way run "else" clause program 2 Program 2 If x10 scene 2 is turned on Then set lights that way run "else" clause program 1 "Is there a way to programmatically tell ISY that a program is no longer running?" Can't really figure out what you mean here. Again, I think you are confusing programs with scenes here.

It has been a hot topic many a time. Personally I would like to see a check box next to each "if" condition that could be used to allow/disallow it as a program trigger. But I guess the frimware developers aren't keen on it since it would be a major re-write and there is a current work around (separating your if's into multiple programs) that works perfectly. Elk rules only allow the first line to be a trigger. But that also requires multiple programs if you want multiple triggers.

Here it is in the least words possible. During a "wait" or "repeat" the program will terminate and start over when anything in the "if" section triggers. As pointed out above: If your dining room motion status changes during the wait (all "status" conditions are triggers with ANY change in status, Elk zones included). Since your variable is integer, it never triggers. .. so no prob. (State variables are the opposite. . .think "STATe and STATus)

The network module is capable of doing this sort of thing, but it depends on your security system. Since your security system is capable of being armed/disarmed from an iphone app, it is probably also able to be done via other network capable devices. But you will need the API on your unit to get the exact type of command and the exact syntax of the command.

Not exactly closed minded. Not to be argumentative, but I don't see you posting data either. While no system I have seen has thermometers at the ducts measuring the outlet temp and run the math to determine when the best time for that system to shut down is, why would they have not picked the most optimized time for the average install. You speak as though the engineers at Carrier/Lenox/etc are stupid and/or don't care about efficiency and that you know more than them. If some particular install is very different than average, you may have a reason to alter their engineering. Now if you have an older system that shuts down the blower the simultaneous to the condenser, then figuring in a little extra run time may help (or may be counter-productive) depending on what type of install you have. 1) If your ducts and your evaporator are in an unconditioned space (attic) you will want to dump as much heat from your conditioned space into the ducts and evaporator prior to the fan shutting down, otherwise it just ends up in the attic. 2) If your ducts and evaporator are inside the house (basement), you will accomplish nothing by running the fan longer. Eventually heat in your home will be sunk into the ducts/evaporator anyway. In this case, extra run time would be counterproductive (electricity needlessly used to run the fan and double counterproductive since the fan generates heat that ends up in your house). Depending on how you go about altering the fan run time, you may end up damaging the equipment and/or voiding a warranty. EDIT: CMartin. . . all's cool, I also got a bit defensive above.

Every home will have different details. But the companies that make hvac systems are in a huge battle with each other to make their systems the most efficient at the best price. They all continue to run the fan after the compressor shuts down for some period of time. The have a great wealth of knowledge and research on the subject to make that decision. The price of the equipment is the same regardless of how long the fan runs after the compressor shuts down, so it would be silly to think that they didn't set it to the most efficient time. Furthermore, the fan consumes electricity. Just because the air coming out the vent is still a degree or 2 colder than the air that is in the house for a few more seconds, doesn't mean that you are being more efficient. It may be that the fan electric consumption costs you more than that slightly cooler air is worth. Again, the hvac manufacturers are far more versed in this stuff that you and I could ever hope to be and it just doesn't make a lick of sense to think that they didn't already optimize this simple control.

I wouldn't. Any hvac unit that isn't ancient will continue to run the fan after the compressor is off an appropriate time to maximize energy efficiency. Running the fan after that would probably not be to your benefit.

Now this sounds interesting. Since my outlet is very close to the motor I would just wire it to the terminals on the motor. I'm not sure what wiring it to an rf control would do for me other than having to change the batteries very blue moon. Yes, you can just wire directly to the two same terminals on the motor itself that also go to the button. Some of the fancier buttons take issue with this because they use those two terminals to provide power to other functions on the button. But I think it was written earlier that you don't have that kind. Even if you do, putting a resistor in series with the I/O link can fix that.

A lot of people just wire the rf controller to the iolinc. Then you don't have to run wires back to the button or up to the unit. Of course you have to have some soldering skills to do that.

I don't think it is a bad idea to at least give it a try. If it makes no difference, then you can always go back to the old wall wart and use you nice power supply for something else. I will also add that the office dsl modem was 7 years old when it went all flaky on me. So it would appear that the power supply suffered some damage either just from time in operation or a spike hit it, or a bunch of little spikes over time got it. No idea, but I thought it was the modem at first, and clearly I was wrong. Just glad I tried changing the power out first.

Cause I just cut and pasted his stuff to address the question about an email at 30 min, 60 min, and then hourly. Yes, I would bundle the emails. Sorry I should have been more clear that I was answering the timing part of things and leaving your stuff to stand for itself.

If Status 'Garage / Main Garage Door Sensor' is On Or Status 'Garage / Small Garage Door Sensor' is On Then Repeat 2 times Wait 30 minutes Send Notification to 'Joe Text' Send Notification to 'Joe Email' Send Notification to 'Liz Text' Send Notification to 'Liz Email' Repeat 4 times wait 60 minutes Send Notification to 'Joe Text' Send Notification to 'Joe Email' Send Notification to 'Liz Text' Send Notification to 'Liz Email' Else - No Actions - (To add one, press 'Action')

Thank you! Like you, I hardly ever need to reboot my modem/router. I have quite a few clients however that have to reboot DSL modems to get back online once in a while and I attribute that to the ISP not their modems. In one vacation home, I installed a mechanical timer switch on the modem/router to power down/up once a day just in case. This means about 15 mins of downtime everyday but its usually in the wee hours of the morning unless there has been a power outage to throw off the timer. When I come across one of these where I have an ISY installed, I will be using the ISY to monitor and reset. -Xathros I had DSL at the office and I used to have to reboot once per month. Then I put an ATX power supply at the office as well. Same modem never again needed a reboot. . . I mean never, and that was for 2 years until I moved offices and got uverse at the new office.

I am not a network expert either. But it seems that .14 is giving you trouble. Perhaps it has nothing to do with the .14, but a simple thing to do would be pick a different IP. Myself, I have my router dhcp set to start at .100. My ISY is static at .9 and it gets that number from ISY settings. The router doesn't have any role in assigning that address and it works always. The only thing the router does is port forward to .9 so I can access from outside my LAN if needed.

Assuming you don't already have it wired into an alarm system. Get an IOlinc and a standard garage door alarm contact. Wire the IOlinc input to the door contactor and the output to the open/close button.

On subject but slightly different. First off, clever! My experience has been that flaky modems and routers are a function of flaky power supplies. I put my modem, router, and ISY all on an ATX power supply and have gone years without a single reboot (prior to that reboots were needed). aside from when the UPS that it was plugged into died.

Sorry for you big PITA issue. Sadly I suspect you have a lot of damaged electronics that are still hanging on by a thread so don't be surprised if you start seeing random failures around the house.

I would use thermostat wire. It is 18g. 24g is pretty small. Thermostat wire comes with 4 or more conductors depending on what you want. These wire carry 24vac. . . not sure on the current, but they wouldn't normally use 18g just to waste money.

Does ISY have a display or output of the temp somewhere? I don't have any Insteon thermostats since my system is all proprietary rs485 (probably) comm signals. I know with Elk temp readings ISY can text/email those two you or send them to an Elk Keypad for display. I don't see thermostat reading in the custom notifications section, but that could be because I don't have any thermostats. If ISY can't send you the temp, I know you can get it to work using cai webcontrol and the ISY.

I love this idea. So what else do I need besides an IOLinc if I want to get the temp from outside? I guess I would do this at the main unit in my basement. Here is a link to wire color schemes. http://www.toad.net/~jsmeenen/wiring.html Just make sure you don't disable your units defrost mode. As far as temp from outside. You can buy the ISY weatherbug module which should be plenty accurate enough. You can also buy a cai webcontrol board and link that to the ISY using WClink program written by IOguy and posted on this forum for transferring temp into ISY. The webcontrol board can also be your I/O controller instead of using the Insteon IOLinc. Kills 2 birds with one stone. Although using weatherbug and IOLinc will require less effort on your part.