Thermostat question

Can someone let me know of the latest/planned firmware exposes both the cool and heat set points like UI5 did?

This week the temps here in the Ohio Valley have swung from 60F-85F. We need heat at night and AC in the day, but no need to heat the house to 76F or chill it to 68F, so a single set point is inadequate.

I only have the one thermostat so I can’t test it without ridiculous amounts of pain.

I know ALTUI gives the ability to set both heating and cooling separately, you could try that with ur thermostat to see how it works

It may depend on the type/model of thermostat. I have a Zwave thermostat and although it’s not convenient, I can go to the Advanced tab → Variables and see both CurrentSetpoint Heat and CurrentSetpoint Cool. I can change these values to whatever I want.

I am in central Ohio and wild temperature swings in the spring and fall can be handled easily with my Vera 3 and Vera Plus. Originally, I used PLEG and now I use Reactor. Here is what I do.

Using either the virtual outdoor temperature sensor or weather underground, I watch the outside temperature. If > 65F, I set the mode to cooling. If <60F, I set it to heating. So this runs 24/7 and solves the heat in the middle of the night but cool in the middle of the afternoon without touching the thermostat.

At the same time, I have my heating and cooling setpoints set based on house mode:
Mode Heating Cooling
Home 68 75
Away 65 78
Night 65 72
Vacation 60 89

The house modes are set by watching the 2 iPhones using iPhone Locator. If either or both are home, then Home. If both are more than 0.1 miles but less than 75 miles, set to Away. If both are more than 100 miles, set to Vacation. This is ignored is my Guest virtual switch is on.

Night is set to be on at 9:30 pm Sunday through Friday, 11 pm Saturday. Turned off 5:30 am Monday through Friday, 7 am Saturday , Sunday, or a weekday with the Holiday virtual switch on.

1 Like

I should have been more specific. I was asking to know if both the heat and cool set points were accessible were I to give a vera/atom to a friend. No plugins, just using the official app and web ui.

Based on the above, the answer is “no, keep your spare controllers in their box”.

I have had a vera3 (ui5) and veraplus (ui7) and know how to make it work with luup, pleg or zwave calls. UI5 showed you both the heat and cool set points, but ui7 (through 7.2ish) only gave you one set point.

I have moved all my real stuff to HomeSeer and only pull out vera/atom every now and then to update firmware and see what works. I am not re-associating my thermostat and messing up my hvac logic just to see if ui7.30/atom finally works again.

Homeseer shows both heating and AC target temps in their app & web control, fwiw.

As I stated above you can view both setpoints in the device variables. The setpoint displayed in the device UI probably depends on the current mode; heating or cooling. I don’t know of a thermostat that automatically switches between the two. You could probably accomplish that with a bit of Lua code in a scene.

A solution could be a virtual thermostat plugin, showing heat and cool thermostat separately. I’m not sure it exists, but it’s doable.

AutoVirtualThermostat does exactly this (auto-changeover and dual setpoint display). But, it’s not a plugin for controlling another thermostat, it controls separate heating and cooling units connected to Z-Wave switches.

In the course of developing AVT and two other thermostat plugins, though, I discovered that the UI7 handling of thermostats has a truckload of hard-coded exceptions that get in the way of using the standard device types and UIs with anything other than what Vera supports natively. You can get 80% of the way there, and then you hit a wall. So all of my thermostat plugins (AVT, Intesis, and Venstar ColorTouch) use custom UIs, and that means they don’t show UIs in the Vera mobile apps (which don’t support the custom UI descriptions that the web UI does).

From the service definitions available and the UI7 code, however, it’s clear there are auto-changeover thermostats natively-supported that show both the heating and cooling setpoints simultaneously. I don’t recall what the specific manufacturers and models are, though, other than Nest. That stands out in the code.

The irony here is UI5 did it. You had a heat set point in red and a cool set point in blue. I remember the kerfuffle when ui6 was aborted and ui7 came out with the dual temp controls missing.

Here is an image I found in the vesternet docs. Not sure if it was ui5 or ui4 as I remember a slightly more refined panel, but this was more or less it.

I have an iris thermostat (aka rts ct101). It has auto mode and will switch based on temps crossing either set point. Did it on ui5, does it on homeseer and both set points are visible.

Did it on ui7 but you couldn’t tell from the default widget what the other set point was.

There are two types of auto-changeover: dual setpoint and single setpoint with differential. In a dual setpoint auto-changeover, the thermostat has separate setpoints for heating and cooling, usually with some required difference between them (typically at least 1° but sometimes more). The unit switches to cooling when the temperature rises above the high (cooling) setpoint, and heating when it goes below the low (heating) setpoint; it’s idle between. In single+diff, there’s a differential around one setpoint, often a default of 2-3° (and often configurable, at least at the thermostat). When the ambient rises above setpoint plus differential, the unit switches to cooling; when it goes below setpoint minus differential, it switches to heating; it’s idle when ambient is in the “deadband” between the two.

Whether or not the UI shows one or two setpoints on its UI should be based on the device’s auto-changeover strategy. “Should be.”

Guess my vera controllers stay in the box until “should” becomes “does”.

1 Like