Running Veralite with Nest gen2. Under the UI5 advanced tab in tools icon for the NEST plugin [which is working fine] I see the normal things that get filled in or can be filled in. I was hoping that by filling in the power in the area labeled
UserSuppliedWattage 6500
by keeping track of the on-time for the NEST unit, it would be possible to get an idea of the power draw reported in ERGY or NEST’s built-in power monitor. I realize not all zwave devices report energy usage, but would this be possible by having the plug-in keep track of time the unit was on?
I used Centerpoint’s smartmeter and a Zigbee Tendril device for power monitoring to see - once the AC had reached normal running- my 5ton unit draws around 6500 watts. Ultimately I’ll get a whole house monitor that can interface with Vera, but for now the most important one I care about is the AC. Unfortunately, NEST doesn’t reflect unit run time until the following day on my ANdroid phone software for NEST and I’d like to be able to check run time by simply looking at the UI5 computer app. Also, do you think we’ll ever see energy usage functionality on the Android app like the one built into the PC version of Vera’s software.
[quote=“egittelman, post:1, topic:175797”]Running Veralite with Nest gen2. Under the UI5 advanced tab in tools icon for the NEST plugin [which is working fine] I see the normal things that get filled in or can be filled in. I was hoping that by filling in the power in the area labeled
UserSuppliedWattage 6500
by keeping track of the on-time for the NEST unit, it would be possible to get an idea of the power draw reported in ERGY or NEST’s built-in power monitor. I realize not all zwave devices report energy usage, but would this be possible by having the plug-in keep track of time the unit was on?
I used Centerpoint’s smartmeter and a Zigbee Tendril device for power monitoring to see - once the AC had reached normal running- my 5ton unit draws around 6500 watts. Ultimately I’ll get a whole house monitor that can interface with Vera, but for now the most important one I care about is the AC. Unfortunately, NEST doesn’t reflect unit run time until the following day on my ANdroid phone software for NEST and I’d like to be able to check run time by simply looking at the UI5 computer app. Also, do you think we’ll ever see energy usage functionality on the Android app like the one built into the PC version of Vera’s software.[/quote]
All I can offer on this is a link to the description of how UserSuppliedWattage is specified (according to the Wiki anyway):
Also, if you track the ModeState variable changes yourself, be aware that the timing of changes is no more accurate than the polling cycle (120 seconds by default). This probably would amount to a very small inaccuracy in the wattage numbers, but just so you’re aware.
I changed my UserSuppliedWattage variable to “300, 1300, 300” and my polling cycle from 120 to 30 (both same results)…it only shows 0 watts used.
This is the fan mode variable generated in the logs:
urn:upnp-org:serviceId:HVAC_FanOperatingMode1.FanStatus On 1395000204
urn:upnp-org:serviceId:HVAC_FanOperatingMode1.Mode ContinuousOn 1395000204
[quote=“AgileHumor, post:5, topic:175797”]I changed my UserSuppliedWattage variable to “300, 1300, 300” and my polling cycle from 120 to 30 (both same results)…it only shows 0 watts used.
This is the fan mode variable generated in the logs:
urn:upnp-org:serviceId:HVAC_FanOperatingMode1.FanStatus On 1395000204
urn:upnp-org:serviceId:HVAC_FanOperatingMode1.Mode ContinuousOn 1395000204[/quote]
If the spaces are really in the UserSuppliedWattage value, remove them as they may be causing the number parsing to fail. But I don’t know if that would fix the issue, or if the Nest plugin needs to implement anything to support this feature. Any guidance is appreciated.
Sorry it didn’t work. I reached out awhile back about how the UserSuppliedWattage variable was supposed to work, but I didn’t get anywhere. It’s possible the wattage triplet is problematic to another plugin [or some other code], or I have to add something to the Nest plugin. Anyone? Ideas?
During the testing without spaces, I accidentally hit heat and it worked. Furthermore, I found that Cool and Heat do work…it was just the Fan Only mode that doesn’t.
I’ll only be using the cooling to account for ~1000 watts the 220V AC compressor since I can’t find a 220V Z-Wave sensor on the market. Good news in this case, the blower/burner unit is 120V, so I was going to use an Aeon 15a appliance module. Eventually set those values for 0 (i.e. 0,1000,0) + the Aeon applianc module can measure the Fan/Gas Furnace will get me a good approximation.
Weird the fan doesn’t register.
Thanks for getting me to try the right sequence of events to help me solve this
Ok, further testing in a hot spell in San Diego…Heat and Fan Only generate the right wattage reliably. Cool works only about 25% of the time. Trying to track it down.
Also, and I don’t know if this is related to Nest Plugin. I set my thermostat to run the fan for every 15 minutes every hour to equalize the temp between upstairs and downstairs. This seems to get reset if I ever update the fan mode via Vera.
The Nest plugin only knows fan Modes of “ContinuousOn” (the “On” fan button) and Auto (the “Auto” fan button). It’s not possible to set the Nest fan Mode to Off, and the periodic fan modes that Nest added later are not reflected in the plugin, so any change from Vera to Nest is going to only switch the fan to Auto or ContinuousOn.
I haven’t yet tried to reconcile the UPnP PeriodicOn mode for SetMode with what is provided via the unofficial Nest interface. Nest offers a bit more functionality than what is exposed in the standard UPnP services, so I didn’t try to address the newer periodic fan modes for fear of only getting it half right. If it’s possible to do this correctly, it would add a “Periodic” button on the UI5 dashboard below the Auto and On buttons in the Fan column. But specifying the intervals from the plugin to Nest remains a question.
[quote=“AgileHumor, post:13, topic:175797”]Ok, getting 0 watts shown with this combination.
Mode: Auto
FanStatus: On
ModeStatus: AutoChangeOver
ModeState: Cooling[/quote]
I would guess that the issue is outside the plugin, because we can see FanStatus On and ModeState Cooling ought to be adding together the wattage consumption of the AC compressor and the fan, and not end up being zero. None of this logic happens within the plugin code.
[quote=“AgileHumor”]Still wanted to report that when Nest is in the status “AutoChangeOver”, the device is not reporting watts correctly.
In my case, Cooling + AutoChangeover = FanOnly watts. Instead, it should be the cooling watts (middle parameter).[/quote]
I suspect, but do not know, that this would happen with any thermostat that supports AutoChangeOver mode (meaning, I suspect a bug in Vera code because it doesn’t know if heating or cooling watts are being used in AutoChangeOver mode, but it could if the code looked at the ModeState variable). This is all a guess without knowing anything about what Vera code does with UserSuppliedWatts. In a perfect world, you would open a bug report with Vera, they would look at their code, the would find and fix any bugs they found, and supply us all with that fix. I don’t know how different our world is from that one.
EDIT: To be clearer, the Nest plugin does not do anything at all with the UserSuppliedWatts variable, so any use of it is external to the plugin, and it’s completely unknown to me what code uses it or how.
