Alert when outdoor weather makes it acceptable/favorable to turn off HVAC

It’d be great if beestat was able to send me a notification when it makes sense to turn off the AC and just open some windows/turn on whole house fan.

A fairly common occurrence is that it’s hot during the day (AC runs) and then temps drop quickly in the evening. I usually am not paying attention so the temps outside may be 68 and I’m running the AC to keep it 72 inside. If there were a way to be notified of this condition when it happens, it would be easy to shut off the AC, open some windows, and run the whole house fan (would still be beneficial even without the fan).

This would be neat. Notifications are something I’ve been working slowly towards so doing something like this isn’t too far off.

The only unsolved problem with notifications of this nature is that it requires constant pinging to ecobee. When you’re actively using beestat this isn’t an issue, but when you leave beestat the syncing slows down considerably to reduce load for both me and ecobee. I try to be respectful of their API service so I limit things where I can.

This idea would probably require updates at least every 30 minutes or so. Only doing this for users with this particular notification wouldn’t be terrible, but I have to plan for growth. I like the idea, just need to give it a bit more thought to solve that problem. In the meantime, you could use the beestat API if you’re technically inclined.

Thanks for the suggestion!

Thanks! If I’m understanding correctly, I wonder if there’s a way to make it less interactive (so less server load) but just as helpful. For example, maybe instead of beestat checking in constantly to see whether the system is running, the user could specify “when outdoor temperature is between x and y, send alert to switch to passive ventilation” etc. I guess that becomes less an HVAC feature and more just a job for a weather app, but would still be great if possible.

Thanks for all you do.

This discussion is interesting, especially since I have to manually do these calculations due to high (not as high as US South) humidity in the summer. Every evening I check what the outside temp will be at night and calculate what equivalent humidity will be in the house. It would be great if beestat could show an icon in the app if it is better to leave the windows closed with AC or shut the system off and open the windows. I use this site for the calculations https://www.richard-stanton.com/humidity-calculator/