Absolute humidities
Posted: Thursday 16 April 2020 8:38
I have several 'TempHum'-devices in my home, devices that sense both temperature and (air) humidity. The humidity value in these sensors is the so-called Relative Humidity (RH): "the ratio of the partial pressure of water vapor to the equilibrium vapor pressure of water at a given temperature" as that wiki page states it. Or as I think of it: A percentage for how much water is in the air, where 0% is no water at all and 100% is where it "starts to rain". Not really, for actual rain you need more conditions apparently, but at least it is the maximum amount of water the air can hold.
I am controling my Heat Exchanger unit based on o.a. that relative humidity, and as many before me have noticed the 100% of the RH varies depending on the temperature, so it doesn't always work really well. To work around this I have a shifting setpoint for my system: depending on the outside air's RH the inside RH target value changes. By looking at the logged data I found that my system can make the inside air's RH at most roughly 20% lower than the outside air's RH, so if the difference is over 20% I simply shift the target value up, to avoid having the fans running all day long. Reading about the topic of RH I found formulas that would enable me to calculate the absolute humidity (AH) given a temperature plus a relative humidity. Out of curiosity I wrote this little script that calculates the absolute humidty (AH) in gram per cubic meter for each of my TempHum-devices. I have no application for it (yet?), it is just to show and log the AH-values for now. This is what I get: The script is in my github: https://github.com/rrozema/Domoticz-scr ... dities.lua.
What I did to make this work:
I am controling my Heat Exchanger unit based on o.a. that relative humidity, and as many before me have noticed the 100% of the RH varies depending on the temperature, so it doesn't always work really well. To work around this I have a shifting setpoint for my system: depending on the outside air's RH the inside RH target value changes. By looking at the logged data I found that my system can make the inside air's RH at most roughly 20% lower than the outside air's RH, so if the difference is over 20% I simply shift the target value up, to avoid having the fans running all day long. Reading about the topic of RH I found formulas that would enable me to calculate the absolute humidity (AH) given a temperature plus a relative humidity. Out of curiosity I wrote this little script that calculates the absolute humidty (AH) in gram per cubic meter for each of my TempHum-devices. I have no application for it (yet?), it is just to show and log the AH-values for now. This is what I get: The script is in my github: https://github.com/rrozema/Domoticz-scr ... dities.lua.
What I did to make this work:
- each of my TempHum devices is named as "<Room name>: TempHum".
- for each TempHum device that I wanted a AH value for I created a virtual sensor of type 'Custom Sensor': .
- then I put the script in the scripts window in Domoticz and enabled it.
- wait for the values to be updated by new incoming temperature or RH values.