I’m pretty sure mine is possessed, because it starts to click on then shuts off and repeats a few times before turning on, and then does the same process sometimes when trying to shut back off. It just made me wonder, what mechanism inside of it is determining that it’s cold enough or warm enough in my living room that it needs to kick on or off.
In: Engineering
It depends on the heater.
The simplest method is to compare the actual temperature to the desired temperature and simply turn on the heater when the temperature is below the desired temperature. The problem with this method is that it can constantly turn the heater on and off.
To fix the problem, you can use hysteresis. Instead of the heater turning on and off at the desired temperature, we make it turn on at the desired temperature minus couple degrees and turn off at desired temperature plus couple degrees.
A more advanced method is to use a PID controller. This method doesn’t only turn the heater on and off, but varies the heating power of the heater too. A properly tuned PID controller can keep the actual value at the desired value very accurately which is why it’s used in pretty much everywhere in automation from water heating in buildings to controlling the motor speed of self balancing robots. The way these controllers work is simple but still complicated enough that I’m not going to explain it here.
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