Comments (27)
Anders from RTP
#1 | Wednesday, November 23, 2005 2:56 PM
Walter Drey, President of Proliphix, just wrote in to add this clarification to my PoE comments:
We carry two lines of thermostats, Basic Series and the Professional Series. We find that the Basic products (NT10e, NT20e) are most often purchased by homeowners for their primary and secondary residences or for their private businesses. The Professional products (NT100e/h, NT20e/h), on the other hand, are sold more exclusively to HVAC dealers and contractors (for light commercial applications) through our growing number of HVAC distributors.
As you know, the Basic Series tstats can only be powered though our low cost Ethernet power injector, our EPA. This method of powering our thermostats is proprietary and was created as a lower cost alternative to true Power over Ethernet (PoE) mid-span power injectors.
However our Professional Series thermostats may be powered by either one of three alternatives. The Professional Series thermostats can be powered by either our EPAs or via network devices (e.g. Ethernet switches and routers) which adhere to 802.3af (PoE) IEEE standard. These models would be designated as NT100e or NT120e ("e" for Ethernet powered).
In addition, the NT100h or NT120h can be powered from the HVAC system directly. In this case, both the "24vAC" and "common" leads from the HVAC system must be present (in most residential settings the "common" lead is not connected or available at the thermostat location).
If you have a PoE switch or router, our Professional Series products would work just fine. Because of the current expense of network equipment which include PoE capability, we don't find much of that technology in residential applications.
John O'Brien from Ottawa / Canada
#2 | Tuesday, December 13, 2005 2:23 PM
I was just curious if you had managed to integrate some humidity sensors/controls into this device... It seems silly to not have such a simple and useful feature.
Anders from RTP
#3 | Tuesday, December 13, 2005 2:47 PM
I don't have anything working yet, but I have a line on IP temp / humidity sensors, so I'll eventually get there. The question is can they eventually be probed by the Proliphix device directly. Under my setup, I would stat the temp/humidity, read the proliphix settings and maybe write new settings to the proliphix so it's not a true integration. Who knows though, that may change in the future. I've mentioned the idea to the president of Proliphix.
Anders from RTP
#4 | Thursday, March 8, 2007 1:45 PM
I now have some graphing capability going with the Proliphix thermostats. I intend to make the code available to all when I get it a bit more streamlined but I'm not there quite yet.
Anders from RTP
#5 | Tuesday, May 22, 2007 7:08 PM
I've just released the source code that creates these graphs in a package called thermostat-graph. Download it an enjoy!
Christian from Berkeley, California, USA
#6 | Saturday, September 15, 2007 1:42 PM
I found this while looking at the gallery for the RRDtool. I've been thinking about using RRDtool to generate graphs for the electricity consumption in my house. I'm about to purchase the Brultech ECM1220.h http://www.brultech.com/ecm1220h.html energy monitor. It doesn't have IP connectivity, but they are coming out with a model that does Zigbee communication. This way you could read it out wirelessly.
I thought you might be interested, since you also seem to have an 'obsession' about logging data and home automation.
Anders from RTP
#7 | Saturday, September 15, 2007 2:09 PM
Christian: Thanks for pointing that out. Looks quite interesting. Of course the lack of IP is disappointing but it looks like you can get the data via USB in realtime so that might be interesting. Anyone played with these yet?
Jason from Kansas City / MO / USA
#8 | Friday, February 29, 2008 1:03 PM
Great post! I'm just about to buy a house which has 3 HVAC systems. I'm planning to make this a very "Smart" home, and thermostats like this will definitely be on my list. I see that they offer ones now which support POE, but at an additional cost of $100/thermostat. I'll probably just go with the NT20e (so I can add thermal sensors later) and the 6-port power block. I'm hoping to be able to interface the units with a Linux-based system that will be running the brains of the home. A quick read through the software API makes it look like this would be a relatively easy task.
JELo from Sheridan / WY / USA
#9 | Saturday, April 5, 2008 3:32 PM
Have you looked at the Netbotz products? Intended more for sever room monitoring, I collected enough parts off of Ebay to have pods all over the house and garage. The pods are USB but the main unit has an IP interface. Haven't explored all of the options yet but there is quite a range of sensing and reporting capabilities. If only there was a way to combine the Proliphix unit, a Netbotz and maybe X-10 or something. Anyway, just throwing out some other ideas.
Dunc from Philadelphia PA USAa
#10 | Tuesday, August 19, 2008 9:13 AM
Thanks so much for putting the graphing app together for the Proliphix thermostats! I'm now running several versions of the app to monitor several thermostats. As I'm running several versions it would be nice if future versions allowed image and database file names could be tokenized. I'm going to poke around in the code a little and see if I can start polling the 2nd remote sensor as I use 2 on all my thermostats. I don't want to look a gift horse in the mouth, but I'm noticing that the heat / cooling indication is not working properly for me. Our thermostats are in an office building and we only run AC. The graphs do not capture all of the ACs' cycles, and occasionally indicate that the heat has come on. Any thoughts on these anomalies? Thanks again,
Dunc
Anders from RTP
#11 | Tuesday, August 19, 2008 9:55 AM
Dunc: Yes, that is a known issue. The problem comes from rrdtool's desire to smooth out the "brick wall" effect. The HVAC state is read from the Proliphix in code. Lets say you get a reading at 10:00AM of the code "2" which means the Proliphix is neither heating nor cooling at the moment. So rrdtool saves this in it's database and a graph is generated. At 10:01AM, the system is cooling so the code returned is a "6". Now when the graph is generated, the blue line should start to show as expected. In the real world, however, the code is returned from the Proliphix at some slight time lag. Lets say that last result is posted 2 seconds after 10:01AM. The graphing run, however, wants to put a pixel at exactly 10:01AM so rrdtool "smooths out" the line between the samples, so we get some value between "2" and "6". As it happens, codes 3, 4 and 5 relate to the heat being on so the graph thinks that the heat was on momentarily and graphs that. I have done my best with MIN and MAX to put that brick wall back in there mathematically though there are edge cases where that doesn't work. Ideas to fix this include using a multiplier that makes the error far less likely or petitioning Tobias Oetiker who wrote rrdtool to add a switch so that feature can be turned off. Either way, there is a way around it. Your code changes are greatly appreciated as well.
James Bathgate from San Bernardino, CA , USA
#12 | Friday, September 12, 2008 4:54 PM
We're looking to put one of these in our office and build a voting system on one of our servers to talk to the thermostat to set the temperature based upon the median vote since there's so much arguing about temperature in the office. Would this be possible?
Anders from RTP
#13 | Saturday, September 13, 2008 12:01 AM
James: Yes, this would be possible in theory. Aside from just reading the temperature from a Proliphix IP thermostat, you can also write to it. The voting idea is very interesting. The more people you can amass towards your "ideal temperature", the more likely it is to be set there. Then people who are chronically cold or warm could petition others in the office to move their vote in a particular direction. That's a brilliant idea. Let us know if you end up building it!
Scott from Austin, TX USA
#14 | Saturday, May 16, 2009 12:08 PM
Anders, what software/hardware are you using to plot the temperature in your home? I'm very interested in doing this. Have been looking at the Prolifix thermostats as well. It appears they can be used to monitor temperature and humidity (if equipped), but have not seen a third party application that could make use of the built-in sensors. Your original post was in 2005, so I'm interested to know what you are using now and in any recommendations you might have. Thanks!
Anders from RTP
#15 | Saturday, May 16, 2009 3:35 PM
Scott: In general, its just a perl script running on a Linux machine. It drives rrdtool to update the databases and build the graphs. I released the code in a package called Thermostat Graph. Should run in Windows as well but I haven't tried. Best of luck!
Ted from Granger, IN USA
#16 | Monday, August 24, 2009 6:36 PM
I have been trying to get NT10e stats to show up on the web site without the firewalled label. A sniffer shows me port 80 going out with 4 packets and port 8081 coming back from the server. I am using cisco routers and placed a port forwarding line at the top of the ACL list. But the stats still show up as firewalled. Any suggestions or secrets? ts
Anders from NY
#17 | Monday, August 24, 2009 7:44 PM
@Ted: I have no idea. Your best bet is to test from the outside on your own rather than trust some external app. Watch the traffic with tcpdump on your internal LAN and see what is or isn't getting through. Best of luck.
Paul Vail from Raleigh, NC
#18 | Tuesday, October 6, 2009 6:30 PM
Anders, your Temp/Humidity PoE sensors: http://itwatchdogs.com/
I'd love to find some schematics and learn to build my own, as these could be useful in my crawlspace, attic fan, shed... all over where I might want vent fans to kick on or off depending on system. Leads always welcome!
Anders from NY
#19 | Thursday, October 8, 2009 7:59 AM
@Paul: Thanks for the link. Looks like they have some interesting devices. I have built serial temperature sensors from kits in the past but I'm still interested in the holy grail of IP based power over Ethernet devices.
Erik from CT
#20 | Tuesday, October 20, 2009 1:49 PM
@Ted: I just installed two NT10e's and had the same frustration. I'm using a Netgear router with simple port forwarding, so if I forward port 8081 on the WAN address, the LAN address must be listening on the same port. It was not obvious at all (to me, at least) that in this situation, you must set the inbound firewall port and the web server http port to the same port in the thermostat admin. Apparently, the inbound firewall port is just the port that the device reports to the server, the thermostat is not actually listening on that port. Of course, if you can do port mapping on your cisco so 8081 on the WAN address maps to 80 on the LAN address, that should work also.
@Anders: Do you have a link to the API Proliphix publishes? I can't locate it on their site...
Anders from NY
#21 | Tuesday, October 20, 2009 2:43 PM
@Erik No, I don't have the API URL. I think they pulled it but I hear you can ask them for it and they will just give it to you.
Yail Bloor from Salt Lake City, UT, USA
#22 | Friday, February 5, 2010 8:05 AM
I am just beginning to research a system to remotely monitor and control my HVAC system. It seems the Proliphix suits my needs well (hard wired, no required recurring costs), my only real concern is the web based GUI, from what I can tell is overly busy. I'd like to have all that control a layer or two behind a more simple GUI, such as a simulation of the faces of my four thermostats with their current display and the ability to make simple changes from that display... then drill down if needed. Is this somehow a possibility without incurring an additional monthly fee?
Jeff from Alberta
#23 | Sunday, March 28, 2010 10:32 PM
How many sensors can these support?
Anders from Cambridge, MA
#24 | Monday, March 29, 2010 4:58 AM
I think 2 for the consumer models. There are commercial models that support more but I'm not familiar with that part of the line.
Earl Brendle from Tampa, Florida
#25 | Tuesday, May 11, 2010 7:56 AM
The only problem with the Proliphix thermostats is the large deadband especially for 2 stage heating and cooling. It really doesn't work well in the deep south where humidity control can be as important if not more than temperature. It would be great if the 1 stage deadband could be set for +- .5 degree and second stage at +-1 degree. Other than that the thermostat is very workable.
Nick from San Bernardino
#26 | Tuesday, May 3, 2011 11:28 AM
Hello Anders,
I just got my second sensor working by modifying your code. Its a bit messy right not, and I am still fine tuning the graph overlaps.
Thanks for releasing your work! If you send me an email I can reply back with the modifications that I have made, if you like.
Tony from Aurora
#27 | Wednesday, April 17, 2013 12:17 PM
unable to power the NT10e thermonstat from a cisco 3750 poe 24 port switch. what type of config do you need on the switch port??