Laboratory planner by day, toddler parent by night, enthusiastic everything-hobbyist in the thirty minutes a day I get to myself.

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Joined 3 years ago
Cake day: July 31st, 2023
  • Thrashy@lemmy.worldtohomeassistant@lemmy.world•What hidden "secrets" have you learned from your home automation?English
    1·
    2 years ago

    My old furnace was hilariously oversized for the house.

    One of the nifty things about smart thermostats like Ecobees is that you can pull usage data from their web portal. I grabbed a CSV file covering a cold snap last year that reached a 100-year record low, and using Excel I summed up the total heat output while we were at that low.

    The furnace was only running 50% of the time, even when it was with a couple degrees of as cold as it’s ever been where I live.

    Needless to say, when I got a new system installed I made sure it was more properly sized, and given that I had a convenient empirical measurement of exactly how many btus I actually needed in the worst case as scenario, that was easily done.