Comment on Why can’t HVAC be made smarter?
zxqwas@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
There are a lot of smart engineers that design those.
If you have an external temperature measurement it helps. But it can’t see the difference between a cloudy day and a sunny day.
If you connect it to an online weather service that helps, but it’s still hard for it to know how much the sun heats your home due to big south facing windows for example.
This is something AI could be useful for. Feed it forecast, inside, outside temp and let it figure out how to balance those against each other for your home. I’m not sure there are many systems like this on the market yet.
Krudler@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
You don’t need to go to that level of complication.
Two sensors in combination, one that detects current heat input one that detects absorbed heat. These modules would be placed about the outer walls.
Then calculate how much heat is going to radiate into the building the rest of the day.
And it can compensate.
We don’t need to be more than a fraction of a degree off and a system like that would be amply accurate.
zxqwas@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
What kind of sensor do you suggest for measuring that? I’m genuinely curious why they are not industry standard.
My guess is price and/or robustness. The RTCs we use are cheap and durable.
Krudler@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
Truly It’s not my line of work so I’m not going to start randomly recommending products, I don’t think it’s fair to talk out my ass hahaha
What I can say however, is the reason I was so bold in my assertion previously, was that I personally do a lot of hobbyist electronics, and wiring up temperature sensors is very simple. It’s very much a trivial aspect to basic circuitry, because heat is such an aspect. It’s in your most basic things from coffee pots to hair dryers but even down to smaller electronics, bulbs and projectors, everything really in its own way.
And then my father was a highly trained meteorologist with the government of Canada for 43 years and then another 10 of consultancy, they scouted him because he was the 100% in all courses math superstar at his university for his year.
My father taught me a lot about how heat is measured and it’s a huge concern in a way that the average weather watcher doesn’t understand. It’s talked about in Watts per Square Meter. So that could be how much heat a structure may absorb per square meter, or perhaps how much heat is dissipated per second in a certain wind.
That’s a major and primary concern of anyone in the agriculture industry, think for example a farmer that holds a barn full of cattle, he absolutely needs to know how much heat that building’s going to dissipate so he can plan for heating.
But it doesn’t end there, it goes into so many different areas where heat is an issue, and weather is the primary driver of heat transfer.
So I guess in summary, a solution is trivial, I’m not sure if there’s an official product, but we’re not talking rocket science!