Monitoring AC (and heater) duty cycle?

Other Devices & Integrations Climate Control & Temperature Sensors
1

We’re spending way too much on electricity, and I suspect that most of this is going to the two HVAC units. (I live in Tucson and it’s July, so this is not too surprising.)

To get a grip on exactly how much of our bill these account for, I need to monitor how much the systems are running. I’ve been looking at various Z-Wave thermostats on Amazon, and I see that they report the current temperature, and you can set the set point or range… but do they report when the system switches on and off?

I’m still very new to my VerdeLite; how would you suggest I go about gathering this data?

(If it helps, I am a programmer and happy to write a script to ping the web API every minute or whatever.)

2

The RCS Z-Wave thermostat reports usage for heating and cooling during each day for the last week.
But there is no way to access it from Vera … only via the Thermostat.

You can use the Counter Feature in the PLEG plugin to accumulate on time.