Temperature Controls trigger with Conditions

[bwawsc]

I'm attempting to create an event to turn on my office heater if the office is occupied and the temperature falls below 65 degrees. I start with a trigger type of Temperature Controls, select a device of ]1: mcsTemperature Office 2 Temperature, select Decreases to Lower Limit, set Lower Limit to 65, set "and persist for" to 5 (for good measure). Then I select Apply Conditions to Trigger, and select Office 2 Occupancy Is ON and Add, then Office 2 Heater is OFF and Add. I want to go back to the temperature control to change it to a Lower Limit of 62, so I click the Conditions button, and... nothing. Can't get back to the trigger to change anything. Finally I find a way: Change the Trigger Type to something else, like Device Value Change, then back to Temperature Controls. I have to reset everything, 'cause it's all cleared out. I save it - looks good, but I want to change something. Open event properties - I'm looking at the Conditions, and no way to get to the Temperature Controls settings, again. Switch to Device Value Change, back to Temperature Controls. This time, the settings are retained. Good - I change the Lower Limit again, and save it - looks ok.

Two questions:

1. Is Decreases to Lower Limit what I want? What if it was at 50 degrees and I walk into the office - will the fact that Occupancy becomes ON make it trigger or does it have to start above 65 and decrease to 65 before it will trigger? Do I really want a Trigger of Device Value Change where Office 2 Temperature becomes less than 65, or is that the same thing?

2. What am I doing wrong that I can't get back to the Temperature Controls from Conditions?

--Bill

[Michael McSharry]

There is a retrigger element in Temperature Control that gives you the ability to select the event trigger to be "goes below" (retrigger = blank or zero) or "is below" (retrigger > 0). The magnitude of the retrigger is the interval as which the plugin checks to see if the trigger event is still present. A value of 1 effectively makes the trigger a full "is below" check.

The conditions of the heater off and occupancy on will be used by homeseer to determine if the trigger reported by mcsTemperature should actually generate an event trigger.

The full "is below" Temperature Control trigger will have the same effect as the "device value under" homeseer trigger. mcsTemperature populates both the device string and device value to provide this capability. What you need to be concerned about, however, is what criteria is used to turn the heater off.

The other option that will soon be available is the Temperature Device Action. In this situation you would set the Temperature Control to be goes outside band without any conditions (i.e. real time control). The retrigger need not be set. In the Temperature Device Actions you you would identify the heater device as the one being controlled with the on-guards being occupancy and heater off. No off-guards.

The second part of your question applies to Homeseer rather than the plugin. I know that I have struggled with getting conditions setup for other events and have played with OR groups as well. I found neither to be intuitive and each time I try I've got to relearn the magical sequence by trial and error. I'm certain if I did it often enough I would know how to do it the next time without difficulty.

[bwawsc]

about it being Homeseer. I thought initially it was how the Plugin was coded, because I could select another Trigger type and toggle back and forth between the trigger settings and the conditions simply by clicking on the Conditions button. I see that Doomotion Trigger has the same problem, though - which means it's probably an artifact of how Plugin triggers are treated by Homeseer.

--Bill