Universal accessory for timing and cycling heat, ventilation...

Details Universal accessory for timing and cycling heat, ventilation... Universal accessory for timing and cycling heat, ventilation...

1999-02-09

2001-01-30

Wayner, William (Department: 3744)

Automatic temperature and humidity regulation

With timing element

Timer other than clock

C236S047000, C165S238000

Reexamination Certificate

active

06179213

ABSTRACT:

TECHNICAL FIELD
This invention relates to computer program control of thermal and ventilation conditions in heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems, and more particularly it relates to special purpose interactively programmable computers for controlling heating, ventilating and air conditioning systems.
BACKGROUND ART
There are no known prior art inexpensive special purpose computer systems that are universally adaptable to automatically dis-enable a variety of heating, air conditioning and ventilating (HVAC) systems under critical timing conditions. Specialty computers are limited to specific types of thermal/ventilation systems for special purpose individual tasks such as the saving of energy. If general purpose computers were to be programmed for control of different heating and ventilating systems, it would be impractical, inconvenient and expensive to have facilities and programming for the computers enabling them to operate with any specific thermal and ventilating control system or to establish specific utility benefits from any such thermal and ventilating control system.
Thus, it is an objective of this invention to introduce a low cost, user friendly, special purpose computerized system for timing control of the operation of thermal/ventilation systems.
There is known in the art a special purpose, low cost system for automatically turning off a thermal/ventilation control system in response to particular encountered conditions, namely: U.S. Pat. No. 5,538,181 to Michael L. Simmons, et al., Jul. 23, 1996 for Automatic Room Occupancy Controlled Fuel Saving System for Air Conditioning/Heater Units. This system however is limited to the special purpose of disabling an air conditioning system when a room is unoccupied.
DISCLOSURE OF THE INVENTION
This invention not only achieves the objective of providing an inexpensive, reliable and user friendly automated computer system for universal operation of different types of heating, ventilating and/or air conditioning systems (hereinafter termed thermal/ventilating systems), but also achieves the objective of providing universal operation for a wide range of heating system utility modes. As a matter of fact the computer control system afforded by this invention provides an easily installed substantially “plug-in” adjunct accessory to existing thermal/ventilating system installations.
To permit universality for the control of existing systems of various types without requiring expensive special software programming of the computer, the special purpose interactive programmable computer for controlling a thermal/ventilation system afforded by this invention includes basic general operational computer programming (
22
,
FIG. 1
) for said computer for automatically operating said system at specified times and over specified timing cycles as supplemented by auxiliary interactively controlled programming means (
22
,
FIG. 1
) for establishing specified operation time control conditions in said computer.
Thus, automatic timing controls are provided by this invention which universally serve to (a) establish the computer to condition the system for semi-automatically responding to internal or external trigger pulses such as occupancy sensors; (b) to establish prescribed on-off cycling periods of system operation; (c) to turn HVAC systems on or off as utility requirements demand; (d) to operate HVAC systems at prescribed duty cycles of operation; (e) to operate over long term or short term cycles depending upon utility conditions; etc.
Output computer control signals are provided by the operating computer system (
22
,
FIG. 1
) for universally controlling either the basic electric operating power of the thermal/ventilation system being controlled or such other conditions as the flow of thermal output air and fluids in different types of systems by means of solenoid actuated control systems to overrule or modify system operation, from a default or existing condition, typically established by a thermostatically controlled system.
The interactive programming feature provided by this invention involves a simple setting of a few control switches, without any necessary knowledge of the internal system logic or computer programming skills (
22
, FIG.
1
). This interactive programming sub-system is integrated with and jointly establishes with internal computer programming (
22
,
FIG. 1
) to establish and assert a comprehensive set of different time control signals for achieving the universality objective of this invention.


REFERENCES:
patent: 5395042 (1995-03-01), Riley et al.
patent: 5462225 (1995-10-01), Massara et al.
patent: 5538181 (1996-07-01), Simmons et al.

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