Air con auto switch off

I'm not worried about getting lost. My luck is not good with these UPS people. I got so annoyed with them wasting my time waiting for them & they don't even have the patience to wait for 5 secs for me to answer the door.

They send them by courier next day, so they don't have a habit of getting lost and can be easily tracked. It is only a small box, but the amount of bubble wrap they put around it would have padded a jubo jet

Mark

Thanks Mark for your info. I'm not keen on mail order as it's too troublesome. I'll see if they sell them in the shops when I move over.

Email the company at the beginning of the thread, they are very helpful. There is a list of supported units, but it is not definitive. If you can't find your brand, ask them. I believe they are also the European distributors, so mail order from them is the way to go. When I originally purchased mine it came with a money back guarantee if it didn't work, and I know of at least one other poster that was also offered the same guarantee.

Mark

Does this sensor work on any brand or type of air con unit & where can you get it in Spain (Rojales, Alicante area)?

Do you need 1 sensor per air con unit?

All it is is a timed infra red movement sensor. You programme it to the same switch off freqeuncy as your a/c unit using the remote (takes less than a minute), and screw it to the ceiling (in line of sight of the IR sensor on your a/c unit) with two screws. Whenever movement isn't sensed by the IR, it will start a countdown to the preset time of 15/ 30/ 45 minutes before it issues the switch off command to your a/c unit. There is a night time setting so that it doesn't switch off in the hours of darkness, obviously when everyone is bed.

Mark

Hi Mark,

What exactly is Ecosense? How does Ecosense work? Is it easy to install it yourself ?

Thanks.

Just following up on the last postings.

We have now had our leccie bills for July and August this year. Last year our bill for these 2 months was just shy of €200. This year we have made a saving of €90 on last year's bills for the same period, plus also factor in the fact that prices have risen and it has been a really hot year this year.

I will hold my hands up and say it isn't all down to the ecosensor as we purchased 2 fans this year which will also have contributed to the lower consumption. But I have to say, I think it works .

Mark

Just to bring this thread out and dust it down again . I had a reply about some of the things brought up about the unit:

Ecosense was designed specifically to offer a fair compromise between owners, and clients, to save energy, and increase the life expectancy of equipment.

Ecosense was designed to ensure A/C equipment is turned off by means of its own control system, if you switch of A/C by removing the power supply (i.e. timers & coin/card operated switching) then you could cause long term damage to the A/C and invalidate the warranty.

As from January this year, every property in spain has been allocated an electrical allowance per month, if you exceed that allowance a fine is levied as a percentage of the bill. So at the end of this season there will be some very unhappy owners.

Finally yes there are A/C's on the market that have inbuilt PIR movement detection, but the control of this function is available to the client via the A/C remote, (somewhat defeats the objective) and yes you could disable Ecosense by unscrewing it from the ceiling and removing the batteries, but personally i think it unlikely.

Hopefully this put some minds at rest over perceived problems. Reading another forum shows owners using the units successfully in several countries.

Mark

Yes, the device will only switch off the air con, you can't set it to turn on at certain times. The unit also isn't clever enough to know if the unit is running or not, so during the day when it senses no motion an off signal will be sent to the unit every 15/30/45 minutes (depending on how you have set it). This is why you want to make sure the night setting is activated to prevent the unit sending the signal in the hours of darkness.

Mark

Hi Mark,

     Is this device only used for switching off the air cond & not turning it on at certain time of the day? How does this unit detect if the air cond is inactive?

Thanks.

So I took my new toy with me this weekend and opened it as soon as Saturday morning arrived. A quick glimpse through the instructions and I had set the self teach function to switch off my unit, I had set it to switch off after 30 minutes of inactivity and had tested it. All that was left was to fit it.

The unit on the ceiling looks like this:

and put into context with the unit it is runnig, looks like this:

So far so good. It does what it says on the tin, so lets see if it can save me any money this year .

There is one annoying thing with it though. I left the unit on the table overnight on Saturday when we went to bed. Because I hadn't set the unit to operate in the night setting mode, every 30 minutes a signal would be sent to the air con unit to switch off. Our air con emits a bleep every time a signal is received from the remote. Can you imagine how frustrating that is?  Problem solved by using the night setting before our keyholder fitted it to the ceiling.

Mark

This is a company in Spain called Euro Meter  that sell euro coin operated meters that can be wired for the air con unit  or to the whole house.  I cant post a link cause im new you will need to google...

To JPD

Hi   could you please let me have info on your euro slot meter, was it bought in Spain, cost etc

Thanks

Hi    thank you for that have looked again so got to check the compatability.

Hi Valjean

Marksfish gave you the link to the website in his first post. Click the link 'this company' in his sentence.

Hi    really interested to hear how you get on with this.  Can you tell us anymore about it and desperate to try and cut down electric bill when renting Apartment out.  Its either that or prepaid meters, anybody got an gen on those.

Thanks

Hi all we have 2 Panasonic inverter units we fitted a 1 euro coin meter to the air con supply the 1 coin gives 80 mins of use with both on full which more than covers the power they use it also means if they want the place really cold when they come back from the beach they can only we are not paying for it they it has been fitted for a year now and has been really good its fully adjustable and will run up to 3 units

We have Daikin air conditioner units fitted. Inverter models.

They also sense body heat and automatically revert to a low setting when the unit senses there are no people in the room.

Upon a persons return, the unit picks up again to the previous setting.

I have no involvement with the company. I just thought it worthwhile to post.

Hi all

Well, the idea certainly IS a brilliant one I agree. It does indeed look like a smoke detector.

If tenants use the aircon sensibly it's not an issue anyway.

Hope it works. Mark. good luck.

0800 9172659

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Ecocense 2000