Assorted Temperatures

You can't control what you don't measure
On the back of the last blog about the weather station (and subsequent data), I've also slowly been instrumenting the house in a few key locations to start collecting data.
Why?
I've no idea how well the house is insulated, how much air-con we are going to need, and, somewhat more importantly, just how much we will need to run the heater in the dead of winter.
On top of that, this is our first house with a basement and our first house that we will NEED to run the natural gas fueled furnace ducted heating for months at a time over winter.
That's a lot of firsts and a lot of unknowns.
No chance of controlling any of that if we don't have some data....

Walking down the stairs into the basement at this time of year (summer), it is pretty impressive the temperature difference between upstairs and down. *
So you really don't need hard data on that. Or do you?
At the time this blog was in draft mode, we will be running the AC in about 2 days time if the forecast holds true. I'd like to know how much colder the AC makes the basement and how much it cools upstairs. Like, actual numbers.
The flip side, then, will be in 4ish months when we start running the heating. Where is the heat going, and where does it need to go?
I suspect that this is the first of a few blogs on the topic and yes, I fully intend to get my thermal camera out and get some data on what we are not able to measure. Things like gaps in insulation and heat leaks around the windows, etc

• Pre-post edit. This blog is taking longer than usual to write due to the time I'm sinking (losing) on irrigation repairs/upgrades and the work in the basement. The hot days forecast has arrived a bit early; we had around 35 °C today, and it will be warmer still for the next two days. So I have just now removed the HVAC filter, left the root cellar door open, blocked off all the basement vents, and figured out how to run just the fan via the Ecobee smart thermostat. So far (about 35 minutes), the bedroom temperature has dropped 1°F. Free cooling? (And yes, I know it's not free, and yes, I am monitoring my power use, and so I know the fan is pulling about 57 watts... way less than running the AC.)
  The blog's feature image is the quick trend I slapped together to see just how much 'free' air cooling I am getting from just moving some of the basement air upstairs.

So, where are the temperature sensors located?
Outside air temp is via the Tempest weather station on the roof of the shop.
Shop. I have 3 sensors in there at the moment. One up quite high over the computers, one halfway up the wall in the middle of the computers, and one around torso height. ie, the human level.
Garage. Middle of the space, just slightly higher than head height.
Inside the house, we have:
Basement big room. This end of the room will become our bedroom once the section wall is built and finished. I'll probably add another sensor somewhere in the middle of this large room since my computers will be located at one end and the TV at the other.
Basement 'root cellar'. It's not a real root cellar, but we have some canned food items stored on shelving in a small room that also houses the ducted HVAC unit, so we needed to call it something, so root cellar it is.
Upstairs Bedroom. This room will become the guest room once we finish the basement and move down there.
The three sensors in the house also measure humidity, so I also log/plot that to see how they track vs outside humidity and keep a rough gut feeling for how we are sleeping at the different humidity levels. (Temecula would often get below 15% at night, and both Freddy and I found we did not sleep so great when it was that dry).

Before we get to the data, here is the device (x3) that I am using in the house to measure the temperature and humidity.

The Shelly H&T might be a bit of overkill since I am not currently running them off battery, and their ultra-low power eInk displays are meant for just that sort of 1-2 years from a set of AA batteries, but they have the option of zero cloud connection and they have MQTT built in, that's the key for me.
I move their data via Wifi and MQTT, so they fit right in with my Node-RED setup.
USA Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CNS167ZG

Here is the main central HVAC unit and duct setup.

I plan to add at least 4-5 sensors to this unit. I just need to get the basement to the point where we can move in before I take the time to install the temperature sensors and some sort of water sensor in the condensate pump sump.

Show me the data.
Ok, so for now, here is how I am seeing the data....
groov View trends. Perhaps a bit basic, but really ideal for my setup, as I already have a ton of data in groov View; it's just too convenient for me to have it all in the same place.

I'm not here to sell groov View, but in short, it allows me to log the data, back it up, and pan back and forth over time, and that's all I need in my use case. Perfect.

I reset everything since I moved up, just didn't find the need to try and compare any of my Idaho data to Temecula, so I have about 5 weeks' worth of data at the moment. Building up every minute.. so yeah, for sure will revisit this blog topic in a few months.

Pretty interesting to see a solid pattern with the wind direction (the grey line). Just about every day starts off north (bearing deg is on the left axis) and swings west before quickly moving back to north in the morning.
The purple line is the live windspeed, and the orange line is the moving peak gust (30 min average). All in mph on the right-hand axis.

Just now, I've written some code in Node-RED that I hope will grab the outside max and min temperatures each day. That could be fun as we get into the depths of winter.

Rounding things out, then, is the humidity.

Mate, temperature blog ended up long.
I find it all very interesting and am really looking forward to using the data to help me keep the house (and occupants) as comfortable as they need to be for as little energy as possible (given the 1970 age of the house and locked-in hardware).
I'd better post a trance track to help calm everyone down after all these words!