Hello all.
It’s been a while since I posted here. I have a Venstar T7900 thermostat, which is a great model. Has nice features and is very configurable. One feature it has which I had always wanted was a cool to dehumidify mode, much like the Carrier “Thermidistat” had back in the day. My question is: what would be considered realistic settings that would provide proper comfort during those autumn months where it’s no longer hot enough to use AC? We tend to get used to the comfort of the drier air provided by AC in the summer and then when autumn comes around, I would sometimes just set the thermostat temporarily to a lower setpoint manually to dehumidify the air for several hours. Now that I can set this to happen more automatically, what would be a realistic humidity target setting, and allowable cooler temperature past the setpoint? I’m in Montreal, Canada which can be quite humid and clammy. I started off by setting the target humidity to 70% and allow 2 degrees past the setpoint. I’ll only enable the feature when the time comes. Would these values sound reasonable as a best practice?
Similarly, The additional electric heating stages (I have two) when the heat pump can’t keep up can be set as if the temperature keeps falling below the 1st stage deadband (or at the same temperature), combined with how much time the setpoint hasn’t been reached. Knowing that HVAC systems in general are more efficient when running long cycles, any suggestions as to what the optimal settings would be? I’m tempted to try longer values first first. Ideally, this setting would change depending on what the outside temperature is, but the thermostat isn’t that progammable! The thermostat phone app has a handy feature where you can view the total runtimes per day, but not the individual cycles. That would have been handy.
Any suggestions, best practices welcome…