Airwave Watch out
After helping a client out, I had to put this Airwave topic into writing.
If you are using a different smart thermostat you might have a similar feature but under a different name.
From Nest:
Airwave can help lower air conditioning costs by automatically shutting off your compressor at the right time. Airwave will only work on Google Nest thermostats that control central air conditioning.
When I think about this feature, the car dashboard analogy pops up in my head.
This feature supposed to save energy. Basically it will kick in just fan mode at some point to circulate air without cooling.
If we use the car analogy,
First, the AC kicks in like so
And after a while, to save the energy it will periodically shut down the AC function.
And let the air circulate so you can distribute already generated cool air more evenly throughout the house. Like so
Well, if you use the swamp cooler. The situation is a little different.
You start out like so
And when the airwave feature comes around to save the energy,
you end up with a following scenario
The smart thermostat is thinking that is helping out but in fact it just shuts the pump down and start blowing hot air which will basically ruin all the previous cooling effort.
So now that you know how this works you would probably want to disable it.
And save the energy by using swamp cooler instead of AC.
Now that is smart!
