Because without weather information your automation solution knows nothing about your environmental conditions. Is it hot? cold? windy? rainy?
Here are three examples of how users work with weather data.
A user in Phoenix adjusts his thermostat set point based upon the outside temperature. When it's really hot he bumps up the cooling setpoint, when really cold he lowers the heating setpoint a bit. In this way he trades off a small bit of comfort to save a lot on energy costs.
Another user in the San Juan Islands in Washington State has retractable awnings that can get damaged in the big winds they sometimes get. When the average wind speed in the last 30 minutes gets too high, or any gust over his threshold happens, HCA energizes the relay which runs the motor and the awnings roll up.
The last example has been done by many people we hear from: If it's too windy, or too hot, or raining, the garden watering sprinklers don't run. After all why waste water?
So don't you need an expensive weather station?
No!
HCA can acquire weather data in four different ways:
If you would like more information about weather support check out the Weather Section of the HCA Appendixes within the Documentation section.
HCA supports Davis Instruments Weather Stations - both their current offerings and older models - that have computer interfaces and work with the Davis WeatherLink software. Why use a weather station? You can create programs whose actions are based upon either current weather conditions or historic weather conditions.
Without a doubt having your own weather station is a very cool thing. Collecting data over time gives you the ability to do local forecasting and see weather trends over time. And that's quite a lot of fun.
But wouldn't it be nice to do something else with your weather data? Like what? Well, how about turning on your sprinkler system only if it is not too windy and hasn't rained the night before? Or open a skylight if it gets too hot inside but keep it closed on cool rainy days? And for those of you in the cold climates, turn on pipe heaters if the average temperature in the last 24 hours is less than 40 degrees?
With HCA and a weather station all these are possible.
While HCA uses the weather station for those sorts of automation decisions, it also can:
More information on the Davis Instruments weather stations can be obtained from their website.
Support for weather stations is in HCA Plus flavor of HCA.
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