Want to be alerted if your HVAC stops working?

Two things occur with this time of year. Very cold weather and visiting family for the holidays. What if your HVAC breaks down while you are traveling? You don’t want your pipes to burst do you? Well you can setup an alert telling you if your room temperature has dropped below a level and tell you exactly what level it’s at. This alert can be sent via email or text. Then you can call your hvac company to go to your house and see what is wrong. If you have a Control4 compatible lock and alarm you can make it real easy to let them in while you are away, but that’s another post.

First you have to have a Control4 thermostat or a card access contact sensor/relay installed. Second you need Composer HE to do the programming. We need to create 2 different agents first, so at the bottom left of composer go to agents. Then at the top left select variables. Add a new one. I’m calling mine “main floor temp”, make sure you change it to a number variable then hit ok.

Now go to email notification at the top left. Then select add below that. I named my notification “main floor temp”. Hit ok and it will add this to your middle left pane. Make sure you highlight it and then a middle pane will appear asking for to enter your email address that you want the notification to be sent to. Depending on your cell phone carrier this is where you enter the info needed to text your cell phone. I put in the subject line “main floor temp”. At the bottom left of this pane you will see a button called “add variable”. Select it and a pop up box will appear with your project tree. Scroll all the way down it till you get to variables. Select the plus sign next to variables. This will expose all the variables you have created. Select the new one you just created, in my case “main floor temp”. After that hit the ok button, select the save button to the bottom right of the middle pane. Your email fields should look something like this.

Now at the bottom left go to programming. Then at the top left select your thermostat. At the middle left select “Temperature Changed”. Then at the top right select the same thermostat. Below that select the conditionals tab. The “temperature is” radio button should already be selected which is what we want. I changed the equal sign to the right to a > sign, to the right of that I changed the field to 78 degrees F and added it. I also added a < sign and 60 degrees F. My main floor shouldn’t get to these temperatures unless their is a problem. Now on the right top scroll down to variables and find the new one we created. At the bottom right select the last radio button “Set to value of”. Then select the drop down box below it. This will pull up all your rooms in alphabetical order. Scroll down to the room your thermostat is in and find your thermostat’s name to the right of it. Then to the right of it find “display temperature” Here is a screen shot of the command line.

Drop this line of code on top of each conditional (?) so that it indents below it. At the top right scroll down to email notifications. Below that change the template drop down box to the new email/text notification you created. Drop this line of code on each conditional also so they indent. This is what your finished product should look like.

Now there are some drawbacks to this. If the power goes out on your house and either your backup battery for the controllers or thermostat battery die then they won’t be able to communicate with each other and send you an alert.

Or if your thermostat is running on battery and it dies or it just craps out then it won’t communicate to the controller that the temp is getting too high or low.

There is a work around for these issues other then the house power failure. If you have a card access contact sensor or relay you can use it’s thermistor. Card access has created a driver that your dealer can put in your system and bind it to your sensor/relay. It will show up as a hvac on your flash navigators so you can monitor the temperature levels for the room it’s in. You can do all the programming we just did with the control4 thermostat, with the card access driver. Instead of monitoring the actual theromstat’s temperature reading you will monitor the relay/sensor’s temperature reading.

Hope you enjoyed
pharmdsmith
Paul J. Smith
paul.smith@thesohoshop.com

Feel free to email me if you have any questions or need a dealer to add any devices or programming to your system.

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