Comment by teruakohatu
5 days ago
This is truely living the dream, well done mate! It is indeed crazy that cabinetry costs the same as the technology.
How does the cat restroom exhaust work? Always on or does it have a sensor?
Do the cat doors prevent sound getting into the kids' rooms from the living room?
The cat room fans are standard bathroom fans. At present we just leave them on all the time -- you can see the switches taped down in the photos. I suppose it might be a good idea to rig up a sensor...
Might be able to use a flipper zero as the sensor, if the cats are chipped. Then you'll have data to catch any unusual usage, like a urinary blockage, before it becomes a serious problem! At that point you're a smart switch and Home Assistant script away from fan control.
I would recommend to use an TVOC sensor that detects smell very easily and then automatically switch on a fan. Could be a fun project.
Just need: - TVOC sensor like the SGP41
- ESP32 microcontroller
- Electric Relay
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Garply had a blockage once and he did a remarkably good job of communicating the problem to us directly!
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I did wonder where the network connections were going into the cat areas!
Constant fans are sucking outside air into your house. Could be part of your Heat/AC efficiency problem mentioned in your post. A timer to run every 10th minute would be a simple improvement.
A lot of newer building codes require fans to be constantly running anyway due to the other part of the building codes requiring high r-value insulation.
Yeah that's a good point, I should turn off the fans for a day and see if it changes the power use...
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A sensor would be easy enough, there are simple non-smart sensor fan timer that will activate a fan for a programable time.