Thaddius Wenderoth
Feeling the Heat
- Jan 21, 2013
- 249
I have an internet connected thermostat right now. But I would like to have the option of being gone all day and turning the stove on when I am heading home without it being on all day. Or to adjust the blower fan. Or to look at diagnostics or change the bottom 3 all from my computer or smart phone. I am a PLC programmer as my profession so I have some really crazy ideas. I would have digital snap disks that would be accessible from the internet control panel. Also flue, firebox and room temps. CFM sensor on combustion air also accessible so you could see early signs of trouble. Hour counters for all moving parts such as auger motors and blowers etc... Sonar sensor in the hopper. All of this would be accessible from one control panel.a "nested" thermostat and a smartphone app can adjust temps with the unit now as the stat is doing the work, would still be 'high/low" but you could use a smartphone with the proper "app" to raise and lower the "call for heat"
im thinking it would work similarly well in "on/off" with stoves equipped with that function with same setup.
i need to study this some , im hoping with our next gen circuit boards we can build this in, im pushing for it to get a hard look. depends on what the boss will let us spend on it i suppose, the new "smartstove" platform would be a good opportunity to build that in if i can make a good enough case. wont likely be retrofittable to older units though unless our circuit board vendor can pull a serious rabbit out of his hat.
then again, if i had the chance to en-corporate every hair-brained idea i come up with into our platforms either we'd be broke , or the class of the field. i do love the idea though i could turn up my stove as i walk out of my office so the house would be cozy when i got home , while turning it down as im away from home to save fuel, i think it would be an astounding selling feature
I have an internet connected thermostat right now. But I would like to have the option of being gone all day and turning the stove on when I am heading home without it being on all day. Or to adjust the blower fan. Or to look at diagnostics or change the bottom 3 all from my computer or smart phone. I am a PLC programmer as my profession so I have some really crazy ideas. I would have digital snap disks that would be accessible from the internet control panel. Also flue, firebox and room temps. CFM sensor on combustion air also accessible so you could see early signs of trouble. Hour counters for all moving parts such as auger motors and blowers etc... Sonar sensor in the hopper. All of this would be accessible from one control panel.
The check is in the mail!gee, is that all, i'll ship it to you monday actually we try to follow the "kiss" system with our units, being a non-service tech based" entity i'd rather have a USB i could have customer hook up so i could read the operational parameters of a unit and remotely adjust from my office,
as for your unit, we played with the "on/off" setup extensively back in 04 when we added the auto igniter. problem is the igniter couldn't be positioned where it could 'self clean" to ensure repeated restarts with a 'dirty pot" just wasn't reliable enough. the stove has been our "flagship model" over the last decade plus having built almost 120,000 of them since its debut in 1998. there may not be a single model of pellet stove in existence which has been built in such prolific numbers in that amount of time. its simply a fantastic simple easy to maintain unit at a fantastic price. we simply were not going to dump the design to come up with a new model which could do this. would have been business suicide. OTOH. i do have stoves which can be adapted to do this with the nested stat. rest of that stuff isnt likely to be looked at seriously at least in the short term. too narrow a demand for that kind of in depth control. not everyone has your background
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