This video goes over how to make a Sensor Trigger that controls a dehumidifier within Portal 2.0. This video and others can be found at our Growlink University webpage.
Audio Transcript:
Hey, this is Josh with Growlink, and today we're going to walk through making a dehumidifier sensor trigger within Portal 2 .0. You'll start by logging in to Portal 2 .0 and selecting the controller that you wish to make this rule on.
In this example, we only have one controller, so we're going to go to the example controller here. At the controller dashboard, we're going to click the Rules subheading, and then select the rule folder and default rule group within this controller.
You can think of both the rule folder and the default rule group as the containers for your rule sense. In this case, we're going to click the sensor trigger sub menu, and then hit add sensor trigger.
In the popup that follows, we're going to start by specifying a name for this sensor trigger. In this case, we're going to choose example dehumidifier sensor trigger. As for time of day, we have a couple of options, all day, which will make it run 24 -7, day only, which will only allow the rule to activate within your day range, night only, where it only allows the rule to activate within your night time window, and custom time, where you can specifically designate when you want this rule to be active and inactive.
In this case, we're going to choose the time of day of all day. Next, we want to choose the sensor that we want to associate with this rule to turn the device on and off. In this case, if we scroll down the sensor menu, we have an environmental sensor that we can pull some humidity data from and select Room Humidity. If one wants to utilize VPD instead of Relative Humidity, one can select the VPD sensor reading off of the Environmental sensor instead.
Next, we want to choose the device that we want to turn on and off based on the rule that we have configured. We can select multiple of these devices, but in this example, we're just going to choose dehumidifier one.
Next, we're going to choose if the set point is dynamic or static. In most cases, setting a static rule is the most straightforward. You specify a value and a deadband and it will never change from those points, whereas the dynamic set point will change based on the value used in the set points drawer, which will be explained in a separate video. In this example, we’re going to use static for this rule type.
Next, we want to choose a value that we want the dehumidifier to maintain. In this case, we'd like the room to stay at 60%. So we're going to specify a value of 60% relative humidity.
Next, we want to specify dead band, basically where we want the dehumidifier to turn on and turn off at. In this case, if we specify a dead band of 2% and an activation point of above, you can see that a logic summary sentence populates that describes this intended logic.
It will allow the dehumidifier to turn on if the room goes above 62% humidity and turn off if it goes beneath 58% humidity, as well as a graph that shows the range and values at which the device is intended to be turned on and turned off at.
There's also some advanced options that can be specified, such as minimum sensor time, minimum runtime, and maximum runtime. None of these options are used with this particular rule setup, and we have a separate video going over these advanced options and their functionalities.
Lastly, there is an override function that reverses the logic put in place. As you can see, when I click override, it changes the rule summary sentence. Instead of turning on the dehumidifier, it's forcing off the dehumidifier when the room goes above 62%, and allows the activator that goes below 58%.
Override rules are typically meant for lighting schedules to override the lights if the room gets too hot, or for filling batch tanks to prevent the fill valve from being called to turn on under certain conditions.
In this case, we're going to leave the override toggled off so that the dehumidifier turns on when the room goes above a certain humidity and turns off when the room returns to a nominal humidity reading.
With all these values set in place, we're going to add this trigger. With the Sensor trigger added, we can now update the controller with those changes by tapping the ‘Update Controller’ button at the top-right of the webpage. This concludes how one makes a Dehumidifier Sensor trigger within Portal 2.0.