Thermostat setpoint monitoring

[alphatech]

Is possible to monitor the thermostat setpoint and the thermostat mode (heating, idle, cooling and etc) within MCS temperature plugin? I would like to know via a graph what setpoint it was and what temperature including (not sure how I would do it) the mode it was operating on i.e heating, idle and etc. I have a 2GIG Z-wave thermostat.

Thanks,
Aldo

[Rupp]

According to Rich the mode should be reporting using the built in HomeSeer Z-Wave stat plugin. If it's not then I would put in a help desk bug report.

[Michael McSharry]

This is really a question that needs to be answered by the thermostat plugin provider. With mcsTemperature you can collect numeric data from virtual devices and chart that data. If your thermostat plugin has devices or you write scripts to parse the data that is available and put that data in virtual devices then mcsTemperature can be used for the monitoring.

[johan]

I'm using mcsTemp to monitor temperature and set point. It was a challange at first, but after Blade published the BLStat plugin it became quite easy. I'm letting the plugin create devices for each thermostat and the I enter those device codes as virtual sensors in mcsTemp. I've got it working for temperature and setpoint, and trying to figure out how to graph the operating mode, which I haven't figured out completely yet.

One word of caution if you have multiple thermostats; they don't always load in the same order in HomeSeer (they can get different thermostat numbers), which screws up Blade's plugin as each thermostat is keyed to the number and not the name or device code you give it in HomeSeer. I have 9 thermostats and I have seen my BLStat configuration parameters jump between thermostats, like the bedrooms getting the TV room schedule, etc.

[johan]

So maybe a follow up question to Michael, what sensor type should I use for a virtual device that will only have integer values? (0=Off, 1=Heat, 2=Cool, 3=Auto, 4=Aux). I've tried "Status" but it only records "0", even when the device value changes.

[Michael McSharry]

The "index" type is what most of my applications use for a generic number. I think the place where you get into problems is that mcsTemperature will obtain the value out the DeviceString unless the DeviceString is null and then it will go get it from the DeviceValue. It is likely BLStat will show things like Hold, Heat, Cool in the DeviceString and these will all resolve to numeric values of 0. If the DeviceString contained null then mcsTemperature would see things like 1 2 or 3 in the DeviceValue and these would be recorded as desired.

What you may need to do is create a virtual device that mirrors the one used by BLStat for mode. Set an event that triggers on each DeviceValue change of the BLStat mode device and the action will be to set the shadow DeviceString to the DeviceValue of the BLStat device. Use the shadow device for mcsTemperature to capture the operating mode.

Another thing you may find more useful if you are going to do analysis of the data is to create a set of On/Off devices for each mode of the thermostat. They would be poplulated the same as the shadow device, but they would be setup in mcsTemperature as switches. This way it is easy to see how long it is in Heat mode vs. Cool mode etc.