jasonpal Posted July 8, 2008 Share Posted July 8, 2008 Hi, I have a customer who has a heat pump and a secondary furnace in their home. They want to know if for example the outside temperature of house is -4 degree Celius, would the control 4 thermostat have the ability to turn off the heat pump and turn on the secondary furnace? What would they have to do to make this to work? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bebster Posted July 8, 2008 Share Posted July 8, 2008 This seems like an area that the HVAC contractor should deal with. You need to be able to read the outside temperature, and control both heat sources as well. I would use Tekmar (or other heating control manufacturer) controls to do this job rather than Control4 if it were my house. You want this to be bulletproof, and not have some glitch cause both heat sources to shut off and then get a maintenance call because some controller needs to be rebooted. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
danlevine Posted July 10, 2008 Share Posted July 10, 2008 Hey,We have an extensive amount of experience with the C4 thermostat. I would recommend not doing this type of application with that thermostat, just like bebster has mentioned this needs to be bullet proof. However, there is a way to do this where control4 can perform the programming and "logic" associated with this, however using their thermostat would cause unecessary headaches. I would recommend checking compatibility with alternative HVAC controllers and use C4 to control it. Once the Zigbee Pro spec is ratified and deployed to C4 gear, it is going to open up a HUGE amount of doors to integrating alternative devices via zigbee. Right now you should use a device with rs232/485 bi-directional protocol. Make sure also C4 already has a driver for this device. We have had decent (not perfect) success with Aprilaire. I just checked 1.3.2 (not 1.6) composer and all I can find in there was numerous Aprilaire drivers, so that may be something to explore.Note - To clarify this may be possible with the C4 thermostat. If you want to give it a shot I think it would be a cool thing to do, however I would make sure you are familiar with thermostats. Additionally MAKE SURE you use the common wire to power the thermostat. Additionally I would put a remote temperature sensor (outside) and wire it to the thermostat. That is how I would "detect" outside temperature. You could do outside temperature monitoring via pulling info from Internet with 1.6 driver but honestly it's not going to be a solid as wiring a sensor to outside. -4 degrees sounds so cold when it is so hot and humid here in nyc. i can't imagine it being this cold but i'm sure it will be here sooner than later. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jasonpal Posted July 15, 2008 Author Share Posted July 15, 2008 Cool, thanks you so much for the reply Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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