I am new to the Community but I program/script so I am not new to the concept of what's happening here; however, I'd like to come up with a way to use the Environment to heat/cool our house.
Eventually I will use this to help poorer people to reduce Heat/Cool bills with Project!
I know that these Boards can sense their Environment...
So with minimal work(physical)/installation @ the home level could this Community HELP with some Arduino/Hardware know-how!?!?
I will continue to work on this and any result I have will for sure be open to the Community here and outside of here
Anyone wishing to participate is welcome !
If you want somebody to collaborate with you, I think you'd be better asking in the Gigs and Collaborations forum. If you want suggestions to solve problems you've encountered, you need to tell us what the actual problem is.
Geothermal is neat, but not available everywhere. You may also want to consider enthalpy and "economizer" heating/cooling.
Enthalpy uses an indoor temperature sensor, an outdoor temperature sensor, and some motorized dampers on an existing HVAC system. In heating mode, if the air outside is warmer than the air inside, you open the dampers to allow outside air to be used as the intake for the furnace. In cooling mode, if the air outside is cooler than the air inside, you use outside air for intake into the A/C. This can result in modest savings in HVAC costs during moderate weather (spring/fall) but can't do much for you in the middle of summer or winter. The high cost of installation may take a long time for ROI though.
An economizer is even less expensive to install and run. You have a simple intake fan that takes outside air and blows it into the dwelling. (Put barometric dampers on the intake and on the exhaust vents on the far side of the house.) Now when the air outside is warmer than inside, and you need to heat the dwelling, you turn the fan on. When the air outside is cooler than inside, and you need to cool the house, you turn the fan on. This works great when you have a large diurnal (day-night) temperature swing (north/west US). Pretty useless in humid places like the south/eastern US though. But in dry climates like Colorado/Arizona/Idaho, you can use a standard evporative ("swamp") cooler as your intake fan and only turn the water on when it gets really hot.
You can also add an economizer software to an enthalpy system for a bit more efficiency.