Thermostat failure alarm

Other Devices & Integrations Climate Control & Temperature Sensors
1

Yesterday I was looking around at my devices and thought that the temperature difference between my two thermostats (Honeywell z-wave) seemed a bit much. I found out that 1 stat was not responding and no longer reporting to vera. Its a few thousand miles away (vacation spot) so I haven’t checked it out to see what failed.

I have been seriously thinking about installing one at our fulltime home where the temp goes down to -40? almost every year. if I had a thermostat failure and froze the house up it would really suck.

Is there any way I could poll it every hour and send an email if there was no response?

Maybe there is an easier way, I’m all ears to finding a solution

Thank You

Kevin R

2

With PLEG

Input Device Property:
Temp Bound to any Temperature Sensor or the Current Temp of your Thermostat

Conditions:
AlertNoChange Temp;NOW > 12:00:00
AlertFreeze Temp < 60

AlertNoChange will trigger if there is NO change in the temperature in 12 Hours.
AlertFreeze will trigger if the temperature ever goes below 60.

You can also limit the alerts to severe weather extremes. Using the Weather Plugin add a device Property:
OutdoorTemp Bound to weather plugin outside temp.

SigWeather          (OutdoorTemp > 95) OR (OutdoorTemp < 36)
AlertNoChange     (Temp;NOW > 12:00:00) and SigWeather
AlertFreeze          (Temp < 60) and SigWeather

Then add Notifications in one of two ways:

  1. Add Notification to PLEG Where condition is Satisfied for both AlertNoChange and AlertFreeze
  2. Add Notifications use Actions in the Advanced Tab for Actions for the above two conditions.

Note … If you have two temperature sensors in the house you can also compare them and generate an error if they are different by more than a few degrees … possibly indicating that one has failed.

3

FWIW, we have had our Honeywells lose Z-wave communication a couple times. Ours are in-house with us, and the fix has been to remove them from the wall for a few seconds and then plug them back in. It seems like maybe the z-wave module’s internal state machine gets wedged. A brief loss of power (which won’t wipe your programming or anything, assuming the button battery is good) seems to reset it.

So if you are dependent on these, you may want to think about putting a relay in the circuit that feeds them power that you can actuate from afar. We had ours wedge a couple times in the first few months, and very rarely since. But if you need to be prepared for this, you’ll need some way to get the same effect as removing them from HVAC power.

–Richard