Editor’s Note – This is the third part of an ongoing series by journalist and geek Marty Winston in his quest to design the perfect smart home of the future with the best technology of today.
Smarty House: About the Weather
Historically, automation has been pretty ignorant about the weather – how many times have you driven by a house with its sprinkler system running during a rainstorm?
You may think that’s just a gaffe and no big deal, maybe because you regard the cost of water as trivial. But it isn’t about the cost of water – it’s about the cost of repairing or replacing your lawn and plantings if they get too much or too little.
And that same litmus test – caretaking versus the cost of repairing and replacing – also applies to some of the degradation to windows and walls and HVAC systems, for example – that automation can help you avoid if you could only make your house more aware of the weather.
You can.
Chains of Consequence
There are so many factors at work here that no one approach to explaining them can make sense on its own, so here are the pieces getting laid out here, and keep an eye on http://40yearhouse.com in the weeks to come for more specifics.
We’ll start with why (as in why different factors make a difference to your home), then what (meaning what you need to know about weather in order to let automation make decisions), then how (getting weather information isn’t trivial, but it can be done).
But First, Definitions
The term “weather” is a collective noun and we don’t intend to take a deep dive into it, but we do want to draw a practical distinction between micro weather and macro weather.
Micro weather is the weather in your yard (and, to some extent, in your house). Any home weather gear, from a thermometer on the wall to a station in the yard, reports micro weather. It is the best possible data you can have about the weather right there, right now. At the same time, it can’t tell you very much about what’s coming.
Macro weather refers to the grander scale of weather that’s likely to affect your micro weather. It’s the result of professional analyses of weather map data from satellites, radar, and collections of ground measurements. These days, it can tell you how many minutes until the rain starts and, more or less, how much to expect. Even better, they can make forecasts that are specific to a very precise location, down to 2 decimal places in latitude and longitude (meaning, in practical terms, a single house address).
Macro weather forecasts score pretty well, but they’re not always accurate. A measured approach is to believe them when they say what’s coming, and to pause activities that might be negatively impacted by that, but to resume those activities (perhaps on a modified scale) depending on what micro weather measurements show actually happened.
Why To Care About Weather
If you live in the South, you probably have an open or screened porch with one or more ceiling fans to create a cooling breeze when you’re out there. That cooling breeze is redundant and unnecessary if Nature is providing a breeze. Monitoring wind speed makes sense.
If you have an irrigation (sprinkling) system, it makes sense to put it on pause if it’s just going to get carried away as a windblown spray.
There are several advanced sprinkling systems that pay attention to online weather forecast sources and soil moisture monitors to fill in for the watering that the skies don’t deliver; those are good answers (not that we’re not going to up the game in our project house, but we’re geekier than you need to be).
So much for the outdoors; there are greater pressures inside.
In fact, a higher air pressure indoors is one of the goals of a so-called “tight” (extremely well-insulated) house. Hmmm… pressure… isn’t that a weather thing?
Should a House Fear Change?
Here’s the low-down: storms tend to arrive with rapid drops in the air pressure outdoors (which explains the big red L on the weather maps). And when a house maintains a high indoor pressure as the air pressure outside drops, it tends to expand (like an extremely stiff balloon), which brings stress both to window panes and to such softer joining materials as caulk, putty, or glue.
Warm and cold fronts can also bring abrupt changes in temperature and humidity; the word “abrupt” is one that should always set off alarm bells when thinking about your home. Abrupt changes outside create a stressful scenario for your HVAC gear, which is then forced to work at its hardest to keep things normalized indoors. Every HVAC system will need eventual repair or replacement, but every time there’s extra stress, that schedule accelerates.
Macro weather sources can let you know when those changes are coming, and automation can finesse HVAC systems into slowly adapting to the changes so that when they do arrive, there’s no need for stressful abrupt adjustments.
We should also mention a tangentially related factor: lightning. Lightning rods at the corners and peaks of roofs and well-sunk ground rods around the house can help prevent roof damage. Whole-house surge protection at the breaker box plus surge protection on critical indoor electronics and surge protection on incoming cable, telephone. or other lines may not fully immunize you from the consequences of nearby strikes, but we know from experience that they can reduce the damage. We also strongly recommend (especially for new construction) using grounded steel conduit on all cabling runs.
What Weather to Watch
Indoor air pressure, indoor temperature (separately in main living areas, attics, and crawl spaces) and indoor humidity (ditto) are useful in comfort control, so there already are (or should be) sensors for monitoring those; so much the better if those sensors can also talk to automation.
The same automation should keep track of those factors outdoors and should, as you now recognize, include both micro weather on-site readings and macro-weather foreknowledge.
How much attention you pay to needs outdoors has a bit to do with climate and a bit to do with the value of your plantings. Automation can easily incorporate soil moisture readings (which, over time, can yield evaporation-rate readings), UV-exposure readings, air movement, and so on from micro weather stations. Macro weather can predict cloudy or overcast conditions as well as temperatures, winds, and rain.
How To Watch the Weather
Automation interfaces to weather data is a work in progress, better than it has been but not as good as we want it to be. API (application programming interface) access to forecast information from Weather.com and Accuweather.com are a good start – both could be better, and probably will get there before long. Machine-readable interfaces to outdoor weather stations from AcuRite require some hacking skills (and will void the warranty); Davis Instruments has a new interface coming for their outdoor weather stations that may make it easy, but we haven’t yet had it in for testing. “Maker” level (Arduino Primo and Raspberry Pi Model 3 B) environmental sensing add-ons are available for hobbyists; deeper-geek guys can get component level sensors to interface to those or other systems, but the finer points of their usage may take some homework to discover.
All of these resources, of course, offer easy ways for humans to watch the weather – we just think that useful automation shouldn’t require human participation. Think of it this way: when is the last time you had to babysit a thermostat?
Weather and the Grounds
OK, we’re cheating now. Weather forecasting doesn’t have anything to do with this, but since it’s ultimately also weather-related, here goes: We have a gorgeous eHang Ghost 2.0 drone with a 4K camera on a spherical mount, a literal eye in the sky.
When leaves and pine needles fall, gutters can clog. Every climb up a ladder to check a stretch of gutter involves some potential for an accident. But we can use the eHang drone to patrol the gutter line and show us any areas that really do need attention, dramatically reducing the danger and duration of gutter-cleaning chores.
Also, after a storm, especially on larger properties, felled trees and standing water are just two of the consequences that can appear and in many circumstances, delaying dealing with them can complicate costs and challenges ahead. So, when the weather is good, we can mark waypoints at the corners of the property line. Then, after a storm, we can let the drone patrol the property line to survey for damage. We don’t risk accidents in the back woods. We don’t even risk wet feet.
And Later…
We haven’t yet discussed what your house can do to change itself when it wants to adapt to weather-related changes or even stable conditions. We still have to get into what all that has to do with stale, musty odors. There’s the realm of preventing other environmental sources of damage. It also relates, believe it or not, to the ratio of carbon dioxide to oxygen in the inside air. That will be in one of our upcoming columns, though perhaps not the next one.
The post Smarty House Part 3 – Weather Or Not, Here It Comes appeared first on Tech50+.