Humidification / Dehumidification

[Phil G]

Does anyone know if the humidifier and dehumidifier status are revealed as nodes in the NS? I don't see them. My downstairs Ecobee controls humidification, and upstairs controls dehumidification.

[larryllix]

Does anyone know if the humidifier and dehumidifier status are revealed as nodes in the NS? I don't see them. My downstairs Ecobee controls humidification, and upstairs controls dehumidification.

yes. you can see them in the status page and use them in programs to read or set

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[Phil G]

@larryllix, I see setpoints but not humid/dehumid device status.

 

[larryllix]

Oh sorry. I have never used the output contact statuses. I always did my own setpoints inside ISY with longer or shorter cycled the humidifier appropriately based on the ISY setpoint. However I did sync my ISY setpoints off my ecobee stat humidity setpoints.

When I built my home many contractors stated I would never need a humidifier, based on the sealing of my construction, so I built the air handler space too tight to add one. Boy, were they wrong! If you use an HRV ventilation system in the winter climate. I used a large room humidifier and had to haul water regularly in winter months. 😪

IIRC, my ecobee 3, and ecobee 4, only ever had one extra contact output. You had to take your choice between usage setup.

Edited September 5, 2022 by larryllix

[Phil G]

21 hours ago, larryllix said:

If you use an HRV ventilation system in the winter climate.

I've never looked too hard into using HRV systems. Air exchange is not a problem, my house leaks like a sieve. I guess the HRV would act as a dehumidifier in the winter since it's chilling the indoor air before exhausting it. It would be interesting to  put eyes on the drip line to see how much water you're removing.

The solution to my problem was to add a few programs to change the dehumidification set point to 55% and set a state variable whenever the humidity hit 60%. This forced the whole-home dehumidifier to start running, and the changed state variable triggers an Alexa routine (which was my goal all along).

[larryllix]

2 hours ago, Hoosier Daddy said:

I've never looked too hard into using HRV systems. Air exchange is not a problem, my house leaks like a sieve. I guess the HRV would act as a dehumidifier in the winter since it's chilling the indoor air before exhausting it. It would be interesting to  put eyes on the drip line to see how much water you're removing.

The solution to my problem was to add a few programs to change the dehumidification set point to 55% and set a state variable whenever the humidity hit 60%. This forced the whole-home dehumidifier to start running, and the changed state variable triggers an Alexa routine (which was my goal all along).

It's not the exhausted air that dries out the house. It is the incoming air that does that. When ventilating my extremely damp cold cellar (over 85% rH) I discovered that rH is not the factor that matters. I would bring in hot humid summer air that was lower rH than the cold cellar Rh and the Rh would rise every time. I had to understand dew point then. After figuring out how to calculate dew point for both environments using ISY calculations (fudged it a lot) the selective ventilation would actually lower the rH of the cold cellar.

Although I could never get the rH below about 75% but I stopped the molding that was ruining things.

To meter both ends of this I used an Insteon 2441WTH stat and two  CAO wireless tags to send information into variables. The inside Tag was a backup to the Insteon stat, only. If the metered range was not reasonable or the Insteon signal was flaky the Tag would switch itself into the calcs.

The most interesting point was using rH to control the humidity. Strange how you can bring in lower rH air and it can raise the destination air rH. Lesson learned on that one.