Patent Document ID: 9910449
Application ID: 13866602
Patent Flag: 1

Claim One:
1. A thermostat for controlling a heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) system in a structure, the thermostat comprising: HVAC control circuitry operable to actuate one or more elements of the HVAC system; a communications component; one or more sensors for measuring characteristics of the structure; and a processor coupled to the HVAC control circuitry and the one or more sensors that is configured to perform operations including: storing temperature information from the one or more sensors and time stamps for the temperature information; causing the HVAC control circuitry to actuate an HVAC function to transition a temperature inside the structure from a first temperature to a second temperature; populating a thermodynamic model that predicts a temperature trajectory of the temperature of the air inside the structure in response to actuation of the HVAC function, wherein: the thermodynamic model comprises a plurality of basis functions that together characterize the temperature trajectory of the air inside the structure in response to the actuation of the HVAC function; the thermodynamic model comprises a plurality of weighting factors corresponding to the plurality of basis functions; and the plurality of basis functions comprises a basis function comprising an expression that models an effect of a rate of temperature change that was occurring in the structure prior to actuating the HVAC function and which exponentially decays from a time that the HVAC function is actuated until a time when steady-state activity overcomes early-cycle activity; fitting the plurality of weighting factors of the thermodynamic model to a portion of the temperature information and time stamps for the temperature information corresponding to times when the HVAC function was actuated; and predicting the temperature trajectory of the air inside the structure using the thermodynamic model.