11 ms·

Automating heating with Home Assistant

122 points by domh 4y ago

Semaphor 4y ago
For anyone interested, there’s a neat HACS integration: Better Thermostat [0] that simplifies some common usages: Auto off on window open heat to room temperature (as opposed to TRV measured temperature) are the big ones for me. [0]: https://github.com/KartoffelToby/better_thermostat https://github.com/KartoffelToby/better_thermostat
- WaitWaitWha 4y ago
  For a bit of clarification if readers are not familiar with Home Assistant Home Assistant is an > Open source home automation that puts local control and privacy first. Powered by a worldwide community of tinkerers and DIY enthusiasts. Perfect to run on a Raspberry Pi or a local server. > Home Assistant Community Store (HACS) is a Plugin in Home Assistant that gives you the ability to download and update plugins that are on GitHub and are not in the Home Assistant standard repository.
sandworm101 4y ago
Typical problem: >> In my house, our nursery both cooled faster and heated faster than any other room in the house. The thermostat (a Nest) controlled the boiler from the living area, and would often turn off the boiler while the nursery was still chilly. Nerd solution: integrated sensors. Smart home devices. Complex multi-zone heating. Issue never really goes away. Each time something is updated/bricked the entire system must be revisited. (See LLT tech tips videos about Linus's new house.) I'm still laughing at his hot LCD displays mounted directly below the thermostats in each room. Actual solution: An electric space heater. Available at any Walmart for 25$. Built in thermostat. Problem solved.
- photoGrant 4y ago
  I find it hard to adjust the majority to fit the minority. Better to cater to the edge cases individually and keep the larger system more stable.
- WaitWaitWha 4y ago
  :D Put an ESP32[0] in the space heater. Detect temperature, humidity, barometric pressure. Detect human presents, identify if it is human versus dog. Provide Zigbee communication to Home Assistant. Send alert if dangerously excessive electricity is used, and shut down power to device. Check external weather to make sure water pipes do not freeze when away, and keep heat sufficiently high to prevent freezing but optimize for lowest power usage. Check every 15 seconds. Write automation that knows when away, on vacation, or price of electricity is too high turning it off, on, or throttling to reduce consumption. Reduce grid usage, by heating during best solar panel power generation. And, then you just began. This is how Home Assistant used. :) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ESP32 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ESP32
  - bob29 4y ago
    Where's the robot to pat you on the back?
    - WaitWaitWha 4y ago
      Shhh. Do not scare them away too early. https://www.ranzhourobot.com/pat-me-robot/ https://www.ranzhourobot.com/pat-me-robot/
    - vsviridov 4y ago
      All because of one simple cherry...
  - mason55 4y ago
    I just stuck a door sensor on the nursery and have the space heater turn on if the door is closed for two minutes (and back off when it’s open for two minutes). Perfect mix for us. Not (much) to break in the automation.
    - Bedon292 4y ago
      What space heater? I work from my basement and its a bit cold down here. I have a manual one but would like to be able to do some automations.
- blitzar 4y ago
  > LLT tech tips videos about Linus's new house I tried, I couldnt take it. Between doing things the most botched way possible and spending the most money possible (My 4 billion $$$$ home theater system clickbait) I couldnt take it anymore. Its a low form of scam / con when you use your home renovation as a tax writeoff and "content".
  - detaro 4y ago
    Isn't that pretty much all LTT content? High on money and flashy-flashy, low on facts and care.
  - sandworm101 4y ago
    Ya but it is also a common syndrome in Vancouver. Someone building a "nice" house is pulled in by people touting various control systems. The systems never really work. It is always the first time the installers to be installing this particular equipment. There are reasons why people with old money still use standard light switches just like poor people.
    - Nextgrid 4y ago
      My rule for home automation is that the automation should merely augment the existing stuff and degrade gracefully in case of failure.
      - pixl97 4y ago
        I automate accessory lighting, but not primary. Christmas/holiday lights, mood lighting, under counter lighting, all that is controlled by automation. Now, primary lighting for the room, there's a switch on the wall for that.
        adql 4y ago
        I remember some IoT switches that just had lamp and switch connector and outside of control did just that - worked as dumb switch so if all else failed lights still worked as usual. It is still adding one extra component that could fail, but it was at least immune to "controller died, nothing works" problem.
- Nextgrid 4y ago
  > Each time something is updated/bricked the entire system must be revisited. The advantage of a fully local, self-contained system is that you can treat it as an appliance - you don't have to update or tinker with it continuously. There's no reason for it to update or brick itself. A friend of mine still has a Home Assistant set up from now almost 3 years ago running with no updates or anything - it just acts like a PLC to manage some lights, switches and toggles heating on/off based on window sensors. Nobody has to mess with it and it just works in the background.
  - sandworm101 4y ago
    >> toggles heating on/off based on window sensors. Do people want this? Maybe I want both warmth and fresh air in the room? And I foresee the day where the window sensor is faulty. I'm shivering in bed as I have an argument with my furnace about which one of us should be in charge of setting the temperature in my bedroom.
    - Nextgrid 4y ago
      It's a fail-safe against leaving in the morning for work, opening the windows, and leaving the heating on full-blast all day long as it tries to heat the outside. It matters even more now given the energy prices in some countries. Hass just sends on/off commands to a self-contained thermostat in response to window sensor state change events. If it fails, you can still manually go to the thermostat and set it to whatever you want.
      - dividedbyzero 4y ago
        Are there any thermostats at all that work completely locally, i.e. without any internet access and no cloud, but still can be controlled via HASS?
        maxerickson 4y ago
        Venstar wifi thermostats have a local API that can be switched on. https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/venstar/ https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/venstar/ I've not used it (I installed one because I wanted scheduling and liked that it had further possibilities and wasn't overly expensive).
- florbo 4y ago
  The real win was balancing the boiler and TRVs. Automating the boiler for efficiency is neat. I'd have kept a spare thermostat connected (with a physical switch for it's power) in case all that automation implodes, though.
- j45 4y ago
  Some things are a hobby to tinker with and learn from.
- danuker 4y ago
  Electric resistive heating is much more expensive than gas heating. Maybe a heat pump is more efficient (about the same as gas, depending on climate) but needs more capital than $25.
  - Someone1234 4y ago
    > Electric resistive heating is much more expensive than gas heating. That seems like a complex question to answer. Electric heating is more efficient than gas heating (100% Vs. 95%), but electricity costs more than natural gas, taking out any benefit. But that isn't even what makes this complicated, if they're running their natural gas whole-home system to heat a single room, how does THAT compare to a more costly room heater? Heat pumps are definitely more efficient (e.g. 300%) but cost $1K for a single mini-split, and installation costs/permitting is expensive. $5K isn't unrealistic for just one installed, maybe $2K~ DIY (assuming you can even pull the permit yourself for both electric and HVAC).
    - mcbishop 4y ago
      I hear that Mr. Cool is a good DIY heat-pump option. The refrigerant is "precharged" / included (i.e. you don't have to mess with refrigerant). https://mrcool.com/diy-4th-generation/ https://mrcool.com/diy-4th-generation/
    - goodpoint 4y ago
      Proper insulation is the best solution.
- deleted 4y ago
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- blitzar 4y ago
  > I'm still laughing at his hot LCD displays mounted directly below the thermostats in each room I caved and watched - as this triggered my interest. It was actually worse than I expected. They really have 'designed' the system to be broken, and they were just pretending they couldnt figure out how to make it work, and had been sat in a freezing house for weeks ... right?
kayodelycaon 4y ago
Interesting. Unless I’m missing something, my Honeywell T9 thermostat already handles most of this. I’ve got 4 remote sensors hooked up to it. It’s fully programmable without any app. (I think it needs WiFi for initial setup, but it’s been fire-walled off since.) It also connects with home assistant over Wi-Fi. Combined with my home-kit window AC unit, I have full control over scripting, with the thermostat able to operate independently if Home Assistant fails.
- Nextgrid 4y ago
  That's my approach to heating as well - I'd rather not have Hass directly control the boiler/radiators with relays since in case of failure you could have the system either stuck on or off. A network-connected thermostat where Hass merely sends commands to is better since it will still retain some functionality should Hass fail.
- nyx 4y ago
  When I got my new HVAC system installed a few months ago (heat pump, woohoo!), they needed to upgrade my thermostat, so they gave me a Honeywell VisionPro 8000, which is a "smart" thermostat but, like your T9 (I think), demands WiFi and some garbage "cloud" service to access the connected features. I replaced it with a T6 Pro, a thermostat which is by all other metrics a downgrade, but which has a single killer feature: Z-Wave. No phoning home, no janky embedded devices on my WiFi network, just a solid integration with Home Assistant that falls back to a regular thermostat if my HA server is down. Seems like Honeywell is moving away from making Z-Wave versions of their products, because I think most consumers are generally content to tunnel their request through some shitty cloud thing every time they want to turn the heat up... but for those of us who are a little more ideologically rigid about keeping their stuff LAN-only, would definitely recommend grabbing a T6 Pro while they're out there.
  - kayodelycaon 4y ago
    As far as I can tell, the only T9 features needing an internet connection are local weather, geo-fencing, and remote control. WiFi isn’t necessary and can be turned off. Quite a few settings can only be set on the thermostat itself. It has an on-screen keyboard and by its appearance, I think it runs some version of android. :)
jabbany 4y ago
Ah, I also use hass to automate my home heating but for a much dumber reason... I live in a really old house where the furnace is on a two-wire control system (open=off, closed=on) so no possibility of working in good smart thermostat solution. So I just patched in a "smart" relay on the furnace wires that let me close them in a software controlled way and use temp sensors to control it over hass. I also kept the old dumb* thermostat connected in parallel and just set it really low as a failsafe to prevent stuff like pipes freezing in case my bodge smart automation job crashes silently when I'm away or something. *: Only marginally newer than the mercury-in-a-tilting-tube ones, the one I have uses bi-metallic coil with a magnet on the end to control a reed switch.
- clairity 4y ago
  any recommendations for a cheap, simple, but "smart" relay+thermometer like this that can be added to a apple home/zigbee network in plug-and-play fashion[0]? i also have a dumb heater that would be nice to be automated. the existing dumb thermometer/switch is too close to the heat, making that thermostat unreliable, and i can't move it without tearing up walls. [0]: without having to run home assistant if possible
  - WaitWaitWha 4y ago
    There "Blakadder's Smarthome Shenanigans" website is a good reference to identify if a Zigbee device might work with your system. If a device is compatible with many, it is almost certain it is also compatible with your solution. https://zigbee.blakadder.com/index.html https://zigbee.blakadder.com/index.html
    - clairity 4y ago
      i went down the rabbit hole a bit and there doesn't seem to be a homekit-enabled millivolt (not low voltage, which is 24V apparently) thermostat available. however, i did find this little project: https://zekesnider.com/using-an-ecobee-thermostat-with-a-millivolt-heating-system/ https://zekesnider.com/using-an-ecobee-thermostat-with-a-mil... it seems you could patch any low-voltage thermostat to support millivolt in the same way (with a 24V transformer and a relay switch), but the ecobee3 lite has homekit support built-in.
PragmaticPulp 4y ago
> In my house, our nursery both cooled faster and heated faster than any other room in the house. The thermostat (a Nest) controlled the boiler from the living area, and would often turn off the boiler while the nursery was still chilly. This Home Assistant project is great fun, and I highly recommend playing with HASS to anyone who likes to play around with and maintain these things. But for anyone looking for an easier solution: Ditch the Nest and get an ecobee with remote sensors. Nest has remote sensors as well, but you can only pick one. ecobee will average across the sensors you choose. It also has a mode that can follow occupancy detection and prioritize rooms with movement, but that's not useful for a nursery with a sleeping baby like this.
- toomuchtodo 4y ago
  Ecobee also gives you access to your own data, Nest does not. It enables projects like beestat (no relation besides being a user). https://beestat.io/ https://beestat.io/
  - j45 4y ago
    Thanks for sharing this tidbit.
  - colordrops 4y ago
    Looks nice. Tried out the demo. What does it do that home assistant can't?
    - toomuchtodo 4y ago
      I don’t use home assistant, so I can’t speak to that.
- chime 4y ago
  > get an ecobee with remote sensors. That's exactly what I thought of when I read the issue because I did that myself and it works great. My Ecobees have multiple sensors and I have zero complaint about them. Fantastic integration with HA too. I love tracking the indoors humidity graph and have alerts on when I should use more moisturizer.
simonbarker87 4y ago
> Install Smart TRVs. This doesn’t actually address the initial problem at all. Smart TRV can’t heat a room if the boiler has been switched off by a central thermostat. A valid point but the way round this is to set the main thermostat to the highest temp you would ever want the house to be and have the schedule to 24 hours or just the primary heating hours of the day. I say this so those in rented accommodation don’t think they miss out on this fun. You can swap TRVs out with no plumbing skills and you don’t need to worry about what primary thermostat you have.
- sokoloff 4y ago
  There are Smart TRVs that can wirelessly trigger a contact closure that will turn on a zone for the boiler. You could also listen to the (usually Zigbee) protocol messages and close a relay yourself if you have a home automation setup (either directly from Zigbee, or by gatewaying the Zigbee to MQTT and then responding to the MQTT traffic). The problem with running a call for heat to the boiler (nearly) full-time is that that will run the circulator pump for the zone and, if there's nowhere for that water to go (because all TRVs are closed and there's no "loopback" pipe), the circulator is going to draw a lot of power and eventually fail from being deadheaded.
  - Nextgrid 4y ago
    > The problem with running a call for heat to the boiler (nearly) full-time is that that will run the circulator pump for the zone and, if there's nowhere for that water to go (because all TRVs are closed and there's no "loopback" pipe), the circulator is going to draw a lot of power and eventually fail from being deadheaded. It's common to leave a single radiator without TRV for that reason - typically the bathroom.
    - nsteel 4y ago
      I've found the TRV-less radiator is usually in the hallway as that's historically where a thermostat would live (ground floor, no windows, cool) and you don't want them to battle each other. You also want it to be sufficiently far from the boiler so the return water cools enough and you stay in/near the sweet spot for a modern condensing boiler. TRVs are often avoided in bathrooms since those rooms have another source of heating (bath/shower) that will screw up what it's trying to do. Also, some smart TRVs don't have sufficient IP rating for such a moist environment. That said, you could install one in a bathroom and people do. Not sure why though, maybe they get carried away with their smart setup.
deepsun 4y ago
The first action should have been "look the nursery for what bridges cold and fix it".
chucklenorris 4y ago
I don't know what type of gas meter you have in uk so this might not work for you but I used a aqara door/window sensor without the plastic case stuck under the meter digits. There's a magnet embedded in the last digit so it will trigger it once per revolution. It looks like this: https://community.home-assistant.io/t/gas-meter-from-xiaomi-aqara-door-sensor-zigbee/348032/25 https://community.home-assistant.io/t/gas-meter-from-xiaomi-... .I saw that others 3d printed an enclosure and moved the reed sensor closer, but, i just wrapped it in electrical tape and it's been sitting there for 6 months without an issue.
- cloakedcode 4y ago
  Allow me to point out that Ireland isn’t in the UK. Irish people get pissed off when someone assumes their country is still part of the UK, for obvious reasons.
  - chucklenorris 4y ago
    Oops, sorry, did not pay attention
Havoc 4y ago
>It is inevitable that some rooms in a house will cool faster than others Feels like a system like this could use a way to pipe air from one room into another to achieve target temperatures. Should be way more energy efficient as 1st line of defense
googlryas 4y ago
Are there smart TRV equivalents for those with forced air heating? IE smart vent covers which open and close based on room temp?
- blcArmadillo 4y ago
  You can get motorized dampers that you install where the branches come off the main trunk. My understanding is it's not great to shut down vents all the way since it increases the static pressure in the branch and the air is just going to try to find ways out. You also have to be careful with closing down too many registers as it can cause too much pressure on the furnace. Some furnaces will shut down in this case.
  - googlryas 4y ago
    Right, with the smart dampers I dream of they would just be placed as register covers throughout the house, and would communicate with each other and the furnace to regulate house temp. So they would never try to close many at once, it's more like the cold room opens wide and the rest close a little bit.
    - foobarian 4y ago
      In my fantasies the central controller can learn how much to open each vent until each room heats up at about the same rate. Presumably that would end up with one or more vents fully open, and the more insulated rooms progressively more closed.
indigomm 4y ago
Modern thermostats are a bit better than simply turning the boiler on when cold, off when hot. They are Time Proportional & Integral (TPI) devices. Put simply, they 'learn' the characteristics of the room - how long it takes to heat up and how much heat it needs to maintain the temperature. This is then used to work out how much to cycle the boiler on/off to keep the actual temperature much closer to the set point. Less variation makes for a much more comfortable room with less temperature swing than a simple thermostat can do. I see no reason this couldn't be built into HASS, but to my knowledge it isn't in there. Also, modern boilers have digital control such as OpenTherm. They aren't just simple on/off devices, but instead vary their output based on the heat demand. The heating controller works out the temperature losses across the system, and gets the boiler to moderate the flow to match. This means that instead of turning on and off all the time, the boiler runs continuously at a low rate. More efficient with less wear and much tighter temperature control.
- lima 4y ago
  Danfoss Ally thermostats have a built-in PID controller that does this, and can be used with Home Assistant via zigbee2mqtt. In theory, you could use aggregate heat demand from the Ally thermostats to control a modulating OpenTherm boiler.
- dtgriscom 4y ago
  Even mechanical thermostats have heat anticipator settings. When the thermostat turns the furnace on, it also turns on a small heater in the thermostat. This simulates the heat that will continue to arrive (thermal momentum, as it were) after the furnace is turned off. Otherwise, the temperature will forever be overshooting the thermostat setting. https://inspectapedia.com/heat/Heat_Anticipator_Adustment.php https://inspectapedia.com/heat/Heat_Anticipator_Adustment.ph...
a1371 4y ago
> My Google Nest Thermostat was part of the problem, and I needed to get rid of it to improve my home heating. The problem is that any central thermostat will shut down the boiler as soon as it reaches its target temperature, even if there are other areas in the house that still need to be heated. I think this is important. The so-called smart thermostats have a very narrow optimization scope.
- dnadler 4y ago
  So, I made a raspberry pi into a smart thermostat with remote sensors all over my house which allowed me to do all kinds of targetted heating, averages, etc. Turns out that Ecobee makes one, and it's quite good. Been happily using them ever since.
- crmd 4y ago
  I feel like my partner and I have been in a virtual thrupple relationship with Nest's useless "machine learning algorithm" for the past five years, passive-aggressively fighting for control of the heat.
dtgriscom 4y ago
My forced-hot-water furnace, probably like most recent furnaces, can run at a range of power levels, producing radiator water at a variety of temperatures. Unfortunately, its only input is a binary one: "gimme heat" or "don't gimme heat". That means there's no way for it to adjusts its output intelligently based on the room temperature deficit. (There is an outdoor temperature sensor that gives it some intelligence, but not a whole lot.) I'd love to have a system where the furnace controller knew the actual and set temperatures for the various zones, and could throttle itself up and down to best meet the heating needs. Haven't seen one, though.
- _huayra_ 4y ago
  I think newer heat pumps (forced air or mini splits) do this. My parents got one and it seems to just run almost all the time, producing a varied amount of heat or cooling. This does indeed require some fancy touchscreen super thermostat thing though, so that's probably the crux of this.
  - pridkett 4y ago
    > This does indeed require some fancy touchscreen super thermostat thing though, so that's probably the crux of this. And that's where things start to, in a technical term, suck. I added a forced air heat pump to my house two years ago. I already had a boiler and radiator heat, this added some duct work to the house that covers most of the rooms. The boiler has got to stay in for right now because it powers the water heater (indirect water heater). I'll probably replace that with a heat pump water heater next year once more of the rebates come online. We got a reasonably high performance heat pump from Lennox. The price was fair - especially given the amount of work that needed to be done to add in duct work to my house. And, to be honest, it works great. At least on the mechanical front. However, because it is a modulating heat pump it requires a communicating thermostat. I'm pretty sure this giant tablet thing mounted to my wall will die before the rest of the system. The software is buggy and laggy - sometimes not taking my finger presses and not saving changes to my schedule. It's ability to detect occupancy is hot garbage because it requires me to have the iComfort app installed and always give it access to my location. And that's where stuff gets really awesome! The iOS app and the web site are such hot trash that every time I use it I feel like I need to write another negative review. There's actually two different versions of the devices that use two different apps - both called iComfort. I'm on the newer "fancier" one that can support multiple homes. But, about half the time the app never loads properly and when it does load it doesn't take setting changes most of the time. Meaning that you need to kill the app and try again. Looking through the source code for the web page reveals why it might have these problems. The JavaScript has numerous syntax errors that browsers might just ignore, inconsistently named functions, no discernible style, and typos that make it obvious that it was outsourced to the lowest bidder. Now, I thought I'd be okay because it has IFTTT integration. Nope. You can turn the thermostat off, but not on. You can change the temperature, but not activate a program. A worthless integration. I'd love to find a way to just replace it with another Ecobee or a even better, something with a true local API. tl;dr: Lennox S30, E30, M30 thermostats are not worth your money.
odiroot 4y ago
I use a Hive thermostat. It's much cheaper than Nest and it doesn't talk to the cloud at all, if you buy the hub-less version. It communicates over Zigbee and works great with Home Assistant over Zigbee2MQTT. My version supports both heating and hot water (important for system boilers in UK) but there's also a "just heating" version for combi-boilers. The installation is really trivial, at least in UK where the programmer plate is pretty much standard in every house. Even if you don't connect it to HA, the programmer/thermostat provided by Hive is so much better than the usual Drayton crap you see in UK.
- blackfawn 4y ago
  Any issues using the Hive without the hub? They sure make it sound required... Any features that don't work, etc? And HA can fully control the Hive thermostat via Zigbee?
  - odiroot 4y ago
    I guess you can call it an issue but it stops being "smart". As in, no special "AI" to decide when to heat etc. You have to program it yourself. Or hook it up to HA and send the on/off commands as you wish. As for HA, there's really no dedicated service or add-on for Hive. But the generic thermostat service is good enough. I combine the scheduled heating in Hive with "on-demand" through HA when needed.
- kinnth 4y ago
  Do you use any thermostat switches on your radiators to manage temperature too? Any recommendation on brands in the UK?
  - odiroot 4y ago
    I just manually alternate bedroom/living room throughout the day. Yes, it's a lot of walking (1up1down) but still better than spending ~£50 on each radiator.
wkat4242 4y ago
I also automate my heating with home Assistant. But for me it's very simple. I have 2 hours of free electricity per day. So these hours I run my plug-in radiator non stop :P pretty easy. In fact I could do the same with a simple mechanical timer obviously.

122 points by domh 4y ago

For anyone interested, there’s a neat HACS integration: Better Thermostat [0] that simplifies some common usages: Auto off on window open heat to room temperature (as opposed to TRV measured temperature) are the big ones for me. [0]: https://github.com/KartoffelToby/better_thermostat https://github.com/KartoffelToby/better_thermostat

WaitWaitWha 4y ago
For a bit of clarification if readers are not familiar with Home Assistant Home Assistant is an > Open source home automation that puts local control and privacy first. Powered by a worldwide community of tinkerers and DIY enthusiasts. Perfect to run on a Raspberry Pi or a local server. > Home Assistant Community Store (HACS) is a Plugin in Home Assistant that gives you the ability to download and update plugins that are on GitHub and are not in the Home Assistant standard repository.

sandworm101 4y ago

Typical problem: >> In my house, our nursery both cooled faster and heated faster than any other room in the house. The thermostat (a Nest) controlled the boiler from the living area, and would often turn off the boiler while the nursery was still chilly. Nerd solution: integrated sensors. Smart home devices. Complex multi-zone heating. Issue never really goes away. Each time something is updated/bricked the entire system must be revisited. (See LLT tech tips videos about Linus's new house.) I'm still laughing at his hot LCD displays mounted directly below the thermostats in each room. Actual solution: An electric space heater. Available at any Walmart for 25$. Built in thermostat. Problem solved.

photoGrant 4y ago
I find it hard to adjust the majority to fit the minority. Better to cater to the edge cases individually and keep the larger system more stable.
WaitWaitWha 4y ago
:D Put an ESP32[0] in the space heater. Detect temperature, humidity, barometric pressure. Detect human presents, identify if it is human versus dog. Provide Zigbee communication to Home Assistant. Send alert if dangerously excessive electricity is used, and shut down power to device. Check external weather to make sure water pipes do not freeze when away, and keep heat sufficiently high to prevent freezing but optimize for lowest power usage. Check every 15 seconds. Write automation that knows when away, on vacation, or price of electricity is too high turning it off, on, or throttling to reduce consumption. Reduce grid usage, by heating during best solar panel power generation. And, then you just began. This is how Home Assistant used. :) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ESP32 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ESP32
- bob29 4y ago
  Where's the robot to pat you on the back?
  - WaitWaitWha 4y ago
    Shhh. Do not scare them away too early. https://www.ranzhourobot.com/pat-me-robot/ https://www.ranzhourobot.com/pat-me-robot/
  - vsviridov 4y ago
    All because of one simple cherry...
- mason55 4y ago
  I just stuck a door sensor on the nursery and have the space heater turn on if the door is closed for two minutes (and back off when it’s open for two minutes). Perfect mix for us. Not (much) to break in the automation.
  - Bedon292 4y ago
    What space heater? I work from my basement and its a bit cold down here. I have a manual one but would like to be able to do some automations.
blitzar 4y ago
> LLT tech tips videos about Linus's new house I tried, I couldnt take it. Between doing things the most botched way possible and spending the most money possible (My 4 billion $$$$ home theater system clickbait) I couldnt take it anymore. Its a low form of scam / con when you use your home renovation as a tax writeoff and "content".
- detaro 4y ago
  Isn't that pretty much all LTT content? High on money and flashy-flashy, low on facts and care.
- sandworm101 4y ago
  Ya but it is also a common syndrome in Vancouver. Someone building a "nice" house is pulled in by people touting various control systems. The systems never really work. It is always the first time the installers to be installing this particular equipment. There are reasons why people with old money still use standard light switches just like poor people.
  - Nextgrid 4y ago
    My rule for home automation is that the automation should merely augment the existing stuff and degrade gracefully in case of failure.
    - pixl97 4y ago
      I automate accessory lighting, but not primary. Christmas/holiday lights, mood lighting, under counter lighting, all that is controlled by automation. Now, primary lighting for the room, there's a switch on the wall for that.
      - adql 4y ago
        I remember some IoT switches that just had lamp and switch connector and outside of control did just that - worked as dumb switch so if all else failed lights still worked as usual. It is still adding one extra component that could fail, but it was at least immune to "controller died, nothing works" problem.
Nextgrid 4y ago
> Each time something is updated/bricked the entire system must be revisited. The advantage of a fully local, self-contained system is that you can treat it as an appliance - you don't have to update or tinker with it continuously. There's no reason for it to update or brick itself. A friend of mine still has a Home Assistant set up from now almost 3 years ago running with no updates or anything - it just acts like a PLC to manage some lights, switches and toggles heating on/off based on window sensors. Nobody has to mess with it and it just works in the background.
- sandworm101 4y ago
  >> toggles heating on/off based on window sensors. Do people want this? Maybe I want both warmth and fresh air in the room? And I foresee the day where the window sensor is faulty. I'm shivering in bed as I have an argument with my furnace about which one of us should be in charge of setting the temperature in my bedroom.
  - Nextgrid 4y ago
    It's a fail-safe against leaving in the morning for work, opening the windows, and leaving the heating on full-blast all day long as it tries to heat the outside. It matters even more now given the energy prices in some countries. Hass just sends on/off commands to a self-contained thermostat in response to window sensor state change events. If it fails, you can still manually go to the thermostat and set it to whatever you want.
    - dividedbyzero 4y ago
      Are there any thermostats at all that work completely locally, i.e. without any internet access and no cloud, but still can be controlled via HASS?
      - maxerickson 4y ago
        Venstar wifi thermostats have a local API that can be switched on. https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/venstar/ https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/venstar/ I've not used it (I installed one because I wanted scheduling and liked that it had further possibilities and wasn't overly expensive).
florbo 4y ago
The real win was balancing the boiler and TRVs. Automating the boiler for efficiency is neat. I'd have kept a spare thermostat connected (with a physical switch for it's power) in case all that automation implodes, though.
j45 4y ago
Some things are a hobby to tinker with and learn from.
danuker 4y ago
Electric resistive heating is much more expensive than gas heating. Maybe a heat pump is more efficient (about the same as gas, depending on climate) but needs more capital than $25.
- Someone1234 4y ago
  > Electric resistive heating is much more expensive than gas heating. That seems like a complex question to answer. Electric heating is more efficient than gas heating (100% Vs. 95%), but electricity costs more than natural gas, taking out any benefit. But that isn't even what makes this complicated, if they're running their natural gas whole-home system to heat a single room, how does THAT compare to a more costly room heater? Heat pumps are definitely more efficient (e.g. 300%) but cost $1K for a single mini-split, and installation costs/permitting is expensive. $5K isn't unrealistic for just one installed, maybe $2K~ DIY (assuming you can even pull the permit yourself for both electric and HVAC).
  - mcbishop 4y ago
    I hear that Mr. Cool is a good DIY heat-pump option. The refrigerant is "precharged" / included (i.e. you don't have to mess with refrigerant). https://mrcool.com/diy-4th-generation/ https://mrcool.com/diy-4th-generation/
  - goodpoint 4y ago
    Proper insulation is the best solution.
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blitzar 4y ago
> I'm still laughing at his hot LCD displays mounted directly below the thermostats in each room I caved and watched - as this triggered my interest. It was actually worse than I expected. They really have 'designed' the system to be broken, and they were just pretending they couldnt figure out how to make it work, and had been sat in a freezing house for weeks ... right?

kayodelycaon 4y ago

Interesting. Unless I’m missing something, my Honeywell T9 thermostat already handles most of this. I’ve got 4 remote sensors hooked up to it. It’s fully programmable without any app. (I think it needs WiFi for initial setup, but it’s been fire-walled off since.) It also connects with home assistant over Wi-Fi. Combined with my home-kit window AC unit, I have full control over scripting, with the thermostat able to operate independently if Home Assistant fails.

Nextgrid 4y ago
That's my approach to heating as well - I'd rather not have Hass directly control the boiler/radiators with relays since in case of failure you could have the system either stuck on or off. A network-connected thermostat where Hass merely sends commands to is better since it will still retain some functionality should Hass fail.
nyx 4y ago
When I got my new HVAC system installed a few months ago (heat pump, woohoo!), they needed to upgrade my thermostat, so they gave me a Honeywell VisionPro 8000, which is a "smart" thermostat but, like your T9 (I think), demands WiFi and some garbage "cloud" service to access the connected features. I replaced it with a T6 Pro, a thermostat which is by all other metrics a downgrade, but which has a single killer feature: Z-Wave. No phoning home, no janky embedded devices on my WiFi network, just a solid integration with Home Assistant that falls back to a regular thermostat if my HA server is down. Seems like Honeywell is moving away from making Z-Wave versions of their products, because I think most consumers are generally content to tunnel their request through some shitty cloud thing every time they want to turn the heat up... but for those of us who are a little more ideologically rigid about keeping their stuff LAN-only, would definitely recommend grabbing a T6 Pro while they're out there.
- kayodelycaon 4y ago
  As far as I can tell, the only T9 features needing an internet connection are local weather, geo-fencing, and remote control. WiFi isn’t necessary and can be turned off. Quite a few settings can only be set on the thermostat itself. It has an on-screen keyboard and by its appearance, I think it runs some version of android. :)

jabbany 4y ago

Ah, I also use hass to automate my home heating but for a much dumber reason... I live in a really old house where the furnace is on a two-wire control system (open=off, closed=on) so no possibility of working in good smart thermostat solution. So I just patched in a "smart" relay on the furnace wires that let me close them in a software controlled way and use temp sensors to control it over hass. I also kept the old dumb* thermostat connected in parallel and just set it really low as a failsafe to prevent stuff like pipes freezing in case my bodge smart automation job crashes silently when I'm away or something. *: Only marginally newer than the mercury-in-a-tilting-tube ones, the one I have uses bi-metallic coil with a magnet on the end to control a reed switch.

clairity 4y ago
any recommendations for a cheap, simple, but "smart" relay+thermometer like this that can be added to a apple home/zigbee network in plug-and-play fashion[0]? i also have a dumb heater that would be nice to be automated. the existing dumb thermometer/switch is too close to the heat, making that thermostat unreliable, and i can't move it without tearing up walls. [0]: without having to run home assistant if possible
- WaitWaitWha 4y ago
  There "Blakadder's Smarthome Shenanigans" website is a good reference to identify if a Zigbee device might work with your system. If a device is compatible with many, it is almost certain it is also compatible with your solution. https://zigbee.blakadder.com/index.html https://zigbee.blakadder.com/index.html
  - clairity 4y ago
    i went down the rabbit hole a bit and there doesn't seem to be a homekit-enabled millivolt (not low voltage, which is 24V apparently) thermostat available. however, i did find this little project: https://zekesnider.com/using-an-ecobee-thermostat-with-a-millivolt-heating-system/ https://zekesnider.com/using-an-ecobee-thermostat-with-a-mil... it seems you could patch any low-voltage thermostat to support millivolt in the same way (with a 24V transformer and a relay switch), but the ecobee3 lite has homekit support built-in.

PragmaticPulp 4y ago

> In my house, our nursery both cooled faster and heated faster than any other room in the house. The thermostat (a Nest) controlled the boiler from the living area, and would often turn off the boiler while the nursery was still chilly. This Home Assistant project is great fun, and I highly recommend playing with HASS to anyone who likes to play around with and maintain these things. But for anyone looking for an easier solution: Ditch the Nest and get an ecobee with remote sensors. Nest has remote sensors as well, but you can only pick one. ecobee will average across the sensors you choose. It also has a mode that can follow occupancy detection and prioritize rooms with movement, but that's not useful for a nursery with a sleeping baby like this.

toomuchtodo 4y ago
Ecobee also gives you access to your own data, Nest does not. It enables projects like beestat (no relation besides being a user). https://beestat.io/ https://beestat.io/
- j45 4y ago
  Thanks for sharing this tidbit.
- colordrops 4y ago
  Looks nice. Tried out the demo. What does it do that home assistant can't?
  - toomuchtodo 4y ago
    I don’t use home assistant, so I can’t speak to that.
chime 4y ago
> get an ecobee with remote sensors. That's exactly what I thought of when I read the issue because I did that myself and it works great. My Ecobees have multiple sensors and I have zero complaint about them. Fantastic integration with HA too. I love tracking the indoors humidity graph and have alerts on when I should use more moisturizer.

simonbarker87 4y ago

> Install Smart TRVs. This doesn’t actually address the initial problem at all. Smart TRV can’t heat a room if the boiler has been switched off by a central thermostat. A valid point but the way round this is to set the main thermostat to the highest temp you would ever want the house to be and have the schedule to 24 hours or just the primary heating hours of the day. I say this so those in rented accommodation don’t think they miss out on this fun. You can swap TRVs out with no plumbing skills and you don’t need to worry about what primary thermostat you have.

sokoloff 4y ago
There are Smart TRVs that can wirelessly trigger a contact closure that will turn on a zone for the boiler. You could also listen to the (usually Zigbee) protocol messages and close a relay yourself if you have a home automation setup (either directly from Zigbee, or by gatewaying the Zigbee to MQTT and then responding to the MQTT traffic). The problem with running a call for heat to the boiler (nearly) full-time is that that will run the circulator pump for the zone and, if there's nowhere for that water to go (because all TRVs are closed and there's no "loopback" pipe), the circulator is going to draw a lot of power and eventually fail from being deadheaded.
- Nextgrid 4y ago
  > The problem with running a call for heat to the boiler (nearly) full-time is that that will run the circulator pump for the zone and, if there's nowhere for that water to go (because all TRVs are closed and there's no "loopback" pipe), the circulator is going to draw a lot of power and eventually fail from being deadheaded. It's common to leave a single radiator without TRV for that reason - typically the bathroom.
  - nsteel 4y ago
    I've found the TRV-less radiator is usually in the hallway as that's historically where a thermostat would live (ground floor, no windows, cool) and you don't want them to battle each other. You also want it to be sufficiently far from the boiler so the return water cools enough and you stay in/near the sweet spot for a modern condensing boiler. TRVs are often avoided in bathrooms since those rooms have another source of heating (bath/shower) that will screw up what it's trying to do. Also, some smart TRVs don't have sufficient IP rating for such a moist environment. That said, you could install one in a bathroom and people do. Not sure why though, maybe they get carried away with their smart setup.

deepsun 4y ago

The first action should have been "look the nursery for what bridges cold and fix it".

chucklenorris 4y ago

I don't know what type of gas meter you have in uk so this might not work for you but I used a aqara door/window sensor without the plastic case stuck under the meter digits. There's a magnet embedded in the last digit so it will trigger it once per revolution. It looks like this: https://community.home-assistant.io/t/gas-meter-from-xiaomi-aqara-door-sensor-zigbee/348032/25 https://community.home-assistant.io/t/gas-meter-from-xiaomi-... .I saw that others 3d printed an enclosure and moved the reed sensor closer, but, i just wrapped it in electrical tape and it's been sitting there for 6 months without an issue.

cloakedcode 4y ago
Allow me to point out that Ireland isn’t in the UK. Irish people get pissed off when someone assumes their country is still part of the UK, for obvious reasons.
- chucklenorris 4y ago
  Oops, sorry, did not pay attention

Havoc 4y ago

>It is inevitable that some rooms in a house will cool faster than others Feels like a system like this could use a way to pipe air from one room into another to achieve target temperatures. Should be way more energy efficient as 1st line of defense

googlryas 4y ago

Are there smart TRV equivalents for those with forced air heating? IE smart vent covers which open and close based on room temp?

blcArmadillo 4y ago
You can get motorized dampers that you install where the branches come off the main trunk. My understanding is it's not great to shut down vents all the way since it increases the static pressure in the branch and the air is just going to try to find ways out. You also have to be careful with closing down too many registers as it can cause too much pressure on the furnace. Some furnaces will shut down in this case.
- googlryas 4y ago
  Right, with the smart dampers I dream of they would just be placed as register covers throughout the house, and would communicate with each other and the furnace to regulate house temp. So they would never try to close many at once, it's more like the cold room opens wide and the rest close a little bit.
  - foobarian 4y ago
    In my fantasies the central controller can learn how much to open each vent until each room heats up at about the same rate. Presumably that would end up with one or more vents fully open, and the more insulated rooms progressively more closed.

indigomm 4y ago

Modern thermostats are a bit better than simply turning the boiler on when cold, off when hot. They are Time Proportional & Integral (TPI) devices. Put simply, they 'learn' the characteristics of the room - how long it takes to heat up and how much heat it needs to maintain the temperature. This is then used to work out how much to cycle the boiler on/off to keep the actual temperature much closer to the set point. Less variation makes for a much more comfortable room with less temperature swing than a simple thermostat can do. I see no reason this couldn't be built into HASS, but to my knowledge it isn't in there. Also, modern boilers have digital control such as OpenTherm. They aren't just simple on/off devices, but instead vary their output based on the heat demand. The heating controller works out the temperature losses across the system, and gets the boiler to moderate the flow to match. This means that instead of turning on and off all the time, the boiler runs continuously at a low rate. More efficient with less wear and much tighter temperature control.

lima 4y ago
Danfoss Ally thermostats have a built-in PID controller that does this, and can be used with Home Assistant via zigbee2mqtt. In theory, you could use aggregate heat demand from the Ally thermostats to control a modulating OpenTherm boiler.
dtgriscom 4y ago
Even mechanical thermostats have heat anticipator settings. When the thermostat turns the furnace on, it also turns on a small heater in the thermostat. This simulates the heat that will continue to arrive (thermal momentum, as it were) after the furnace is turned off. Otherwise, the temperature will forever be overshooting the thermostat setting. https://inspectapedia.com/heat/Heat_Anticipator_Adustment.php https://inspectapedia.com/heat/Heat_Anticipator_Adustment.ph...

a1371 4y ago

> My Google Nest Thermostat was part of the problem, and I needed to get rid of it to improve my home heating. The problem is that any central thermostat will shut down the boiler as soon as it reaches its target temperature, even if there are other areas in the house that still need to be heated. I think this is important. The so-called smart thermostats have a very narrow optimization scope.

dnadler 4y ago
So, I made a raspberry pi into a smart thermostat with remote sensors all over my house which allowed me to do all kinds of targetted heating, averages, etc. Turns out that Ecobee makes one, and it's quite good. Been happily using them ever since.
crmd 4y ago
I feel like my partner and I have been in a virtual thrupple relationship with Nest's useless "machine learning algorithm" for the past five years, passive-aggressively fighting for control of the heat.

dtgriscom 4y ago

My forced-hot-water furnace, probably like most recent furnaces, can run at a range of power levels, producing radiator water at a variety of temperatures. Unfortunately, its only input is a binary one: "gimme heat" or "don't gimme heat". That means there's no way for it to adjusts its output intelligently based on the room temperature deficit. (There is an outdoor temperature sensor that gives it some intelligence, but not a whole lot.) I'd love to have a system where the furnace controller knew the actual and set temperatures for the various zones, and could throttle itself up and down to best meet the heating needs. Haven't seen one, though.

_huayra_ 4y ago
I think newer heat pumps (forced air or mini splits) do this. My parents got one and it seems to just run almost all the time, producing a varied amount of heat or cooling. This does indeed require some fancy touchscreen super thermostat thing though, so that's probably the crux of this.
- pridkett 4y ago
  > This does indeed require some fancy touchscreen super thermostat thing though, so that's probably the crux of this. And that's where things start to, in a technical term, suck. I added a forced air heat pump to my house two years ago. I already had a boiler and radiator heat, this added some duct work to the house that covers most of the rooms. The boiler has got to stay in for right now because it powers the water heater (indirect water heater). I'll probably replace that with a heat pump water heater next year once more of the rebates come online. We got a reasonably high performance heat pump from Lennox. The price was fair - especially given the amount of work that needed to be done to add in duct work to my house. And, to be honest, it works great. At least on the mechanical front. However, because it is a modulating heat pump it requires a communicating thermostat. I'm pretty sure this giant tablet thing mounted to my wall will die before the rest of the system. The software is buggy and laggy - sometimes not taking my finger presses and not saving changes to my schedule. It's ability to detect occupancy is hot garbage because it requires me to have the iComfort app installed and always give it access to my location. And that's where stuff gets really awesome! The iOS app and the web site are such hot trash that every time I use it I feel like I need to write another negative review. There's actually two different versions of the devices that use two different apps - both called iComfort. I'm on the newer "fancier" one that can support multiple homes. But, about half the time the app never loads properly and when it does load it doesn't take setting changes most of the time. Meaning that you need to kill the app and try again. Looking through the source code for the web page reveals why it might have these problems. The JavaScript has numerous syntax errors that browsers might just ignore, inconsistently named functions, no discernible style, and typos that make it obvious that it was outsourced to the lowest bidder. Now, I thought I'd be okay because it has IFTTT integration. Nope. You can turn the thermostat off, but not on. You can change the temperature, but not activate a program. A worthless integration. I'd love to find a way to just replace it with another Ecobee or a even better, something with a true local API. tl;dr: Lennox S30, E30, M30 thermostats are not worth your money.

odiroot 4y ago

I use a Hive thermostat. It's much cheaper than Nest and it doesn't talk to the cloud at all, if you buy the hub-less version. It communicates over Zigbee and works great with Home Assistant over Zigbee2MQTT. My version supports both heating and hot water (important for system boilers in UK) but there's also a "just heating" version for combi-boilers. The installation is really trivial, at least in UK where the programmer plate is pretty much standard in every house. Even if you don't connect it to HA, the programmer/thermostat provided by Hive is so much better than the usual Drayton crap you see in UK.

blackfawn 4y ago
Any issues using the Hive without the hub? They sure make it sound required... Any features that don't work, etc? And HA can fully control the Hive thermostat via Zigbee?
- odiroot 4y ago
  I guess you can call it an issue but it stops being "smart". As in, no special "AI" to decide when to heat etc. You have to program it yourself. Or hook it up to HA and send the on/off commands as you wish. As for HA, there's really no dedicated service or add-on for Hive. But the generic thermostat service is good enough. I combine the scheduled heating in Hive with "on-demand" through HA when needed.
kinnth 4y ago
Do you use any thermostat switches on your radiators to manage temperature too? Any recommendation on brands in the UK?
- odiroot 4y ago
  I just manually alternate bedroom/living room throughout the day. Yes, it's a lot of walking (1up1down) but still better than spending ~£50 on each radiator.

wkat4242 4y ago

I also automate my heating with home Assistant. But for me it's very simple. I have 2 hours of free electricity per day. So these hours I run my plug-in radiator non stop :P pretty easy. In fact I could do the same with a simple mechanical timer obviously.