Vstat not following schedule

[ZoRaC]

Came home last night to a house that was a bit colder than planned. All thermostats seemed to be in “away”-mode instead of following its schedule.

At 0030 am the thermostats was set manually to “away” (“natt”). The schedule should have switched them back to “day” early in the morning, but they stayed on “night” the entire day. Also, one of the schedules showed the Thursday schedule instead of the Saturday one...

Any ideas on why this happened?

[SteveMSJ]

Came home last night to a house that was a bit colder than planned. All thermostats seemed to be in “away”-mode instead of following its schedule.

At 0030 am the thermostats was set manually to “away” (“natt”). The schedule should have switched them back to “day” early in the morning, but they stayed on “night” the entire day. Also, one of the schedules showed the Thursday schedule instead of the Saturday one...

Any ideas on why this happened?

/

That doesn't sound good at this time of year

We need to get to the bottom of what is happening but presumably you are running the Beta version 3.0.9.6 which I haven't generally released yet?

It's been running fine for me for over a week, in fact I'm now testing 3.0.9.7. which has the limit on the total number of VStats removed. I have 7 VStats running and they are all on schedule and showing the correct day's schedules.

I can see from your screenshot that it is indicating one of your temperature sensors is dead. Is it really dead or are you experimenting with a short time span for when it assumed they are dead?

When you say they all switched to 'Away' ('natt') do you mean the 'Night' mode with the default name of 'Low'. "Away' would be the frost setting which is effectively Off, i.e. not running the schedule.

Can you see if there is anything in your log at 00:30 when they changed to 'Natt'?
How many VStats do you have set up? If they all changed at the same time it is unlikely to be somebody pressing buttons so it's either an HS Event or a bug in the pi.

Whilst a bug in the pi seems likely, 00:30 seems a strange time so make sure you don't have an event that fires at this time. A bug in the pi would most likely have showed itself at midnight when the schedules roll over or at one of the scheduled change times.

Filter the log for SDJ-VStat messages and see if there is anything odd.
Is the plug-in definitely still running or has it perhaps crapped out? If it has stopped is there anything in the log to indicate a problem.

If it is still running try stopping and re-starting it and see how it goes.

Let me know about the above and I will investigate further.

Steve

[SteveMSJ]

ZoRaC
Any update on your issue? I hope you aren't frozen into your house, should we call the emergency services

Seriously though, I am keen to release the latest updates but am holding back in case there is an issue with the beta you have been using.
Don't worry if your busy or away it can wait until after the Christmas period.

Steve

[ZoRaC]

Sorry, I've been away for the holidays.

We need to get to the bottom of what is happening but presumably you are running the Beta version 3.0.9.6 which I haven't generally released yet?

Correct.

I can see from your screenshot that it is indicating one of your temperature sensors is dead. Is it really dead or are you experimenting with a short time span for when it assumed they are dead?

Actually, the internet was down due to an issue with the ISP after a poweroutage earlier that day. That caused HS not to be able to communicate with the Netatmo-servers to fetch the temperature, so the plugin correctly marked it as dead!

When you say they all switched to 'Away' ('natt') do you mean the 'Night' mode with the default name of 'Low'. "Away' would be the frost setting which is effectively Off, i.e. not running the schedule.

Sorry for the confusion, I use "day", "night" and "holiday" as modes - so in this case "away/natt" was the "low"-setting, not "frost".

Can you see if there is anything in your log at 00:30 when they changed to 'Natt'?

I probably need to elaborate a bit; when I set the house into "night-mode", I manually set all VSTAT to "low". Sometimes we go to bed early and keeping the VSTATS in "high" a few hours after that would be a waste of money. So this particular day, we switched the house not "night" at 00:30 and hence the event manually switched it to the "low"-setting, as it is supposed to. Usually, this happens before midnight, so that might be why we haven't had any issues like this before?

How many VStats do you have set up? If they all changed at the same time it is unlikely to be somebody pressing buttons so it's either an HS Event or a bug in the pi.

I have 6. And they all changed at 00:30, by the event above.

Hope this helps to pinpoint the issue?

[ZoRaC]

Just tried to reproduce the issue, but when triggering the event now, everything seems to be working as expected...

[SteveMSJ]

Just tried to reproduce the issue, but when triggering the event now, everything seems to be working as expected...

Hi ZoRac,

Sorry for the delayed response but I have a cold and retired to bed.

I've just noticed something odd in your original screenshot which might have been what was causing the problem. The Weather Compensation is showing an external temperature of -100 degrees C giving an advance of 780 minutes! Your external temperature sensor is Netatmo so this is probably caused by the internet issue you mentioned.

I probably need to modify the plug-in to pick up an issue such as this. I'll see what I can do.

Steve

[SteveMSJ]

I've just noticed something odd in your original screenshot which might have been what was causing the problem. The Weather Compensation is showing an external temperature of -100 degrees C giving an advance of 780 minutes! Your external temperature sensor is Netatmo so this is probably caused by the internet issue you mentioned.

Thinking more about this:
Because of the erroneous external temperature reading of -100C, from your Netatmo, the VStats will have been in Hi(Auto) from midnight presuming that your scheduled change to High/Day is before midday. This is because the schedule is advanced by 780 minutes (13 hours) but the plug-in limits the advancement to the start of the new day, so at 00:00 your VStats will have changed to High/Day due to the advanced schedule. When you changed them all to Low/Night, by your event at 00:30, this will have 'Held' until your next schedule change which, due to the advanced start of the schedules, won't have been until your schedule changed to Low/Night. At that point they will have returned to Auto which will have been Low/Night. They will not have returned to High (Auto) until the next scheduled change or midnight whichever came first.

So, I can see what happened and why manually changing all your VStats to Low/Night just after midnight combined with your erroneous external temperature sensor reading caused the problem.

Steve

[ZoRaC]

Hi ZoRac,

Sorry for the delayed response but I have a cold and retired to bed.

I've just noticed something odd in your original screenshot which might have been what was causing the problem. The Weather Compensation is showing an external temperature of -100 degrees C giving an advance of 780 minutes! Your external temperature sensor is Netatmo so this is probably caused by the internet issue you mentioned.

I probably need to modify the plug-in to pick up an issue such as this. I'll see what I can do.

Steve

Wow, great catch! I didn’t notice that and it makes perfectly sense!

I’ve had some issues earlier where the Netatmo wasn’t updated for a few days, without me noticing. So I have an event that sets it to -100 if it’s unchanged for a couple of hours, so that I’ll see it on my HSTouch-screens:
That was something I added before starting using your plugin, so I completely didn’t think about this...

Perhaps you could ignore a non-updated value for the external temperature-sensor as well, just like the internal ones?

Hope you get well soon!

[ZoRaC]

Did a quick fix - the “ERROR!”-value is now “100” instead of “-100”.

[RoChess]

Just hope the air-conditioning is not then going to kick into high gear, trying to get the house cool enough in anticipation