Elk Rules for Turning HVAC On/Off when doors/windows Open/Close

[felixrosbergen]

Hi All,

Can somebody give me some pointers for ELK Rules that basically make the HVAC system go off (Set Heating/Cooling Mode to OFF) is one or more doors or window are left open for longer then 5 minutes?

And then turn the HVAC system back on IF all the doors and windows stay closed for 5 minutes. This second rules shoudl however only apply if the first rule was executed since otherwise the HVAC may never go back on (if the doors are often used).

My wife likes to come home and open the deck doors and then forget the AC is on..or she'll turn it off and then later not turn it back on.

 

[Lagerhead]

You might use "WHENEVER BURGLAR STATUS BECOMES NOT READY TO ARM" as a general indication of doors and windows being opened. Similarly, "WHENEVER BURGLAR STATUS BECOMES READY TO ARM" when all of the doors and windows are closed. May need to arrange some of the zones into a different area, depending on your security requirements, for this to work.

 

[bjdraw]

You might use "WHENEVER BURGLAR STATUS BECOMES NOT READY TO ARM" as a general indication of doors and windows being opened. Similarly, "WHENEVER BURGLAR STATUS BECOMES READY TO ARM" when all of the doors and windows are closed. May need to arrange some of the zones into a different area, depending on your security requirements, for this to work.

This is a perfect start, but you might also want to create two automation tasks for turning the AC on and Off. This makes it easier to integrate the functionality with other rules and easily kick them off from other UIs like the Elk Java UI or the eKeypad iPhone app.

 

[sic0048]

MavRic - you are using CQC as well aren't you? If so, I think you could create a trigger that would react to any of the ELK Zones you specified changing status. So if the doors and windows were located on zones 1-5, 10-19, and 21-32 (I'm just making those up), you could have CQC looking for any of those fields to go "unsecure." When that happened on any of the zones, it could start a user specified timer and if that timer reached zero before the zone was "secured" again, then you could turn off the HVAC. Then you start another timer that would turn the HVAC back on unless a zone is unsecured again during the second timer's countdown.

I think it would be pretty easy to do this inside of CQC and you wouldn't waste any of the valuable ELK rules space.

 

[felixrosbergen]

You might use "WHENEVER BURGLAR STATUS BECOMES NOT READY TO ARM" as a general indication of doors and windows being opened. Similarly, "WHENEVER BURGLAR STATUS BECOMES READY TO ARM" when all of the doors and windows are closed. May need to arrange some of the zones into a different area, depending on your security requirements, for this to work.

Can you arm multiple areas with a single code? I currently have 1 area and a mix of door/window sensors and motions. Anybody walking trips a motion and the area becomes NOT READY TO ARM.

Unless I'm missing something i don't see this working well.

It woudl take a lot of rule space to have each door window trigger then timer.

I coudl try this in CQC, but my skills in CQC are lacking behind those of ELK rule which are already poor.

 

[sic0048]

Watch Dean's videos on triggered events (there might actually be two: part 1 and part 2). I don't think it will be too difficult to do this with CQC. I know setting up the triggers is easy, then we can work on getting the different timers working together to produce the desired result.

We can always hop on the chat room to help out and you could post on CQC and get some help that way. IVB is the king of triggered events.