I know Ecobee doesn’t (yet) support swamp coolers, though I don’t think I’m the only one who has used the DX Compressor settings to control a swamp cooler. Having the option to manually select it on beestat may help with some of the cooling scoring algorithms.
One of the problems with this would immediately be adoption. Heat and cool scores are pegged to your system type; that’s not changeable. If I added Swamp Cooler as an option and you switched to it, you would instantly have nobody to compare to.
I’ll have to do some research on Swamp Coolers to see whether or not that’s a good idea.
That’s definitely true, though I’m not sure that’s a valid issue for two reasons. First, for some users (or at least for me), the comparison function isn’t really the main benefit of beestat - it’s the better reporting, graphs, and the temperature profiles I’m pretty fond of. So for me (I know, just one person’s opinion), having a period of time with no comparisons is acceptable. But maybe more importantly, if you currently have some people who are using the ecobee to control swamp coolers, then we are really skewing the group numbers as it is, so it would be good to get us out of that system type data set. It’s a larger issue though as the Ecobee itself isn’t capable of natively controlling a swamp cooler/evaporative cooler and I don’t know if that will happen until evaporative cooler manufacturers get a little more aligned with conventional HVAC control standards. I just put up this idea here in case adding the tag was a fairly simple thing for you to do.
That’s a fair argument. Adding new system types isn’t especially difficult. As long as users know what they’re getting into I think it would be fine to include it.
Cool, yea I doubt people would select a cooling type called “Evaporative” unless they knew what they were doing. I’d also be curious to see after a few months or a year how many people besides me selected it, to potentially give me some leverage when speaking to EcoBee again.
