Airtouch4 with Home Assistant - Automation and Monitoring

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#2912590 11-May-2022 10:46

Does anyone see occasional failures with their HA / Airtouch4 automations? The automations say they've run, but some or all of the actions are not applied. I've had two today:

Turning heating for my lounge on / up during the free hour run, but didn't take effect. That zone is turned off overnight. It works perfectly most days. When I manually started the automation it didn't work, so I restated HA and Airtouch.
Turning on fan mode / ventilation half worked. It changed from heating mode to fan mode, and it turned the correct zones on / off, but changing to Damper mode and setting the percentages didn't work.

I manually insert a one second pause between actions that communicate with Airtouch 4, as that seems to help make it more reliable. I wonder if increasing those delays might help? Any other suggestions?

K123

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#2912703 11-May-2022 16:32

Nothing in the logs? I cannot offer any specific experience yet, but ask me in two weeks.

However, from an operations point of view, declarative is better than imperative and I try that with HA too as it should give developers better options for retries etc.

I.e. Try using "service: scene.apply" with all your settings instead of a list of steps

YMMM as I have no real evidence HA actually works better this way. Specifically with HA I have found the trace history in "debug automation/script" quite accurate about what went wrong

eluSiveNZ

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#2912720 11-May-2022 17:46

As K123 mentioned check the automation trace - it's the little clock wind icon.

https://www.home-assistant.io/docs/automation/troubleshooting/

This will step out where it may have failed to trigger.

timmmay

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#2912730 11-May-2022 18:23

My steps are triggering fine, it's just not taking effect in the Airtouch. For example, my 18:00 automation this evening shows the action below executing, which worked fine for the past few weeks, but when I looked at the Airtouch app I could see it hadn't actually applied. Oddly enough though there are about six steps in that automation, some of the later steps such as setting the bedroom temperatures applied just fine. So I guess it's a problem with the integration or the Airtouch.

How would I go about working through this? My logs are quite bare, the only thing in them is an entry telling me the integration is third party and if HA is unstable to remove it! I've just changed the log level down to info to see if anything interesting shows up.

service: climate.set_temperature
data:
temperature: 24
target:
entity_id: climate.living

Aside: these backup scripts work well to backup the Pi to an image file I can flash to another SD card and run perfectly. I have a bash script I run manually which mounts my local PC, runs an image backup, then unmounts the PC. I wrote it to another SD card (64GB high endurance Sandisk I think) and it worked the same as the original card :)

timmmay

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#2912767 11-May-2022 22:30

Ah here's the error, from the logs. It looks like after this it reconnects, that command is lost, but later commands in the action work. Nothing in the history indicates a problem.

I'll look at scenes thanks

Copy and paste below.

This error originated from a custom integration.

Logger: custom_components.polyaire.airtouch4
Source: custom_components/polyaire/airtouch4.py:159
Integration: AirTouch 4 (documentation, issues)
First occurred: 10:15:00 PM (1 occurrences)
Last logged: 10:15:00 PM

Connection error in receiver!

timmmay

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#2912827 12-May-2022 10:04

I had that same error reoccur every time an automation for the Airtouch fired last night. I restarted the Airtouch tablet then restarted the Pi, and things seem to be working ok again. I don't really trust it so much any more though.

I've set up an email alert so if anything pops up in the log I should know about it fairly quickly. For now though I'll set up some automations using the native apps to make sure my heating all runs in the free hour.

2022-05-12 07:02:00 ERROR (MainThread) [custom_components.polyaire.airtouch4] Connection error in receiver!
2022-05-12 07:02:00 INFO (MainThread) [custom_components.polyaire.airtouch4] Message receriver restarting with reconnect...
2022-05-12 07:02:00 INFO (MainThread) [custom_components.polyaire.airtouch4] (Re)connecting...
2022-05-12 07:02:00 INFO (MainThread) [custom_components.polyaire.airtouch4] (Re)connected!
2022-05-12 07:02:00 INFO (MainThread) [custom_components.polyaire.airtouch4] Message receiver (re)started...

K123

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#2912836 12-May-2022 10:27

That is a bit concerning. Any likelihood it is indeed your wifi?

Sharesies kids

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timmmay

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#2912848 12-May-2022 11:07

K123: That is a bit concerning. Any likelihood it is indeed your wifi?

I'm not aware of any WiFi problems. I use the Fritzbox 7590, when I did a continuous ping for a while the latency varied a bit between 2.5ms and 863ms (average 23ms which seems a bit high) but every packet was delivered.

479 packets transmitted, 479 received, 0% packet loss, time 478719ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 2.071/23.969/863.015/61.581 ms

K123

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#2922836 5-Jun-2022 09:38

I can confirm the HACS AirTouch4 integration loses connectivity and fails to reconnect. The more official one only seems to have this issue at startup sometimes. Both look easy to fix.

I can post pretty graphs and show my dashboards but first
...

Our gas heating was 20kW. I'm worried our downstairs system is undersized. I thought trawling the internet I would find either
- temperature change per hour for a right-sized heating system
- recommended overnight temperature (16C?) and then recommended day temperature (18-20C) and discussion about the transition

Feels like I am the only person asking these two questions which makes me wonder if I am asking the wrong question

Any advice? How long do your houses take to heat in these winter mornings?

.

timmmay

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#2922846 5-Jun-2022 10:52

K123: I can confirm the HACS AirTouch4 integration loses connectivity and fails to reconnect. The more official one only seems to have this issue at startup sometimes. Both look easy to fix.

I can post pretty graphs and show my dashboards but first
...

Our gas heating was 20kW. I'm worried our downstairs system is undersized. I thought trawling the internet I would find either
- temperature change per hour for a right-sized heating system
- recommended overnight temperature (16C?) and then recommended day temperature (18-20C) and discussion about the transition

Feels like I am the only person asking these two questions which makes me wonder if I am asking the wrong question

Any advice? How long do your houses take to heat in these winter mornings?

.

A retry mechanism in code usually isn't that difficult. I'm not great with Python but I'll have a look some time.

I don't think you're asking the right question about temperature change or recommended temperatures. Can you take a step back and give us the big picture? ie what problem are you having, what equipment do you have that you're trying to address with it (e.g. 8kw ducted heat pump), and how are you using the equipment?

Psilan

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#2922852 5-Jun-2022 11:03

I found the default IP my AirTouch gave me 192.168.1.20 wasn't the best. It's a backup IP for a lot of devices, e.g. Unifi cameras and devices. Might be an issue?

Voyager referral - https://refer.voyager.nz/68QKJ8XKK

K123

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#2922861 5-Jun-2022 11:33

What I want is 18C in the mornings. What I am seeing is that 2.5 hours of heating (5 am - 7:30 am) is only increasing the temperature less than 1C downstairs (concerning) and 2C upstairs (probably OK).

I am doing one thing that can be considered "wrong" is turning off the system overnight but I'll try setting it to 16C and I don't expect a huge improvement given the house was mostly 15C at it's coldest. 5C outside for reference. Possibly I "should" set the system to 18C 24/7. This picture shows the time to heat quite clearly:

These are two Daikin systems, one Airtouch4. FDYA100AV1 (12.5 KW) upstairs and FDYA140AV1 (16.5 kW) downstairs.

I know the heat "escaping" upstairs greatly complicates the equation which is partly why I was hoping to find information on simpler installers to understand what is typical.

Based on that what question do you think I should be asking?

timmmay

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#2922887 5-Jun-2022 13:34

16 and 12 kw is a LOT of heat, if it's only giving you 1-2 degrees of temperature increase something is wrong. I can't really tell you what because you'd want someone to look at a lot of things. Floor area, insulation, how well sealed it is, where the heat is generated, how it's distributed, temperature of the air at the outlets, airflow, heat stratification, etc. If you use a heat pump occasionally for spot heat you're not just heating the air, you're heating everything in the house including the walls, the furniture, everything, so even pumping a lot of heat in cold objects in the room will be pulling the temperatures back down. You could try leaving it on 20 degrees for a few days to warm it through, have a read of this thread from here.

We have about 40 square meters of area heated by a 12kw ducted heat pump, not including hallway which isn't directly heated and another room that's rarely turned on. As our house is well insulated and heating is turned on any time we're in the house it never really falls below 19 degrees. We heat the lounge to 25 degrees and bedrooms to 21 - 22 degrees. In that area I would expect a heat increase of 2-4 degrees per hour I had the system turned on.

Here's the last 48h temp history.

K123

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#2923065 5-Jun-2022 17:59

Thanks Timmay, great to have a reference point even though it sounds hard to compare. Partially insulated 1910 house and excluding bathrooms it is 210m2 and given the stub height 700m3. Nothing like 12kW into 40m2 of your house which will be better insulated.

More sensors below. Mucking around a bit but no don't intend to do spot heating, just keep the kitchen warmer in the mornings. I'll try a steady 16C overnight tonight.

timmmay

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#2923084 5-Jun-2022 20:05

My house was the coldest house I'd ever been in when I bought it. A couple of layers of batts in the ceiling made a MASSIVE difference. Ceiling insulation trumped everything else, easily. Wall insulation, underfloor insulation, and later double glazing all helped a bit more. Until I had ceiling batts there was no point heating the place, all the heat went straight out the ceiling almost immediately.

How's your ceiling insulation? Downstairs that will be difficult. Those graphs of temperature drops looks like insulation or drafts could be a big problem.

The area that our 12kw ducted system heats most of the time is probably more like 50 - 60 square meters with 2.8 stud height. It does heat another bedroom but we rarely turn it on.

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