Automated heating in an old Irish central heating system?

emaherx

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118221730#Comment_118221730

To be honest, Tuya works fine within its own app, the only drawback here is many devices depend on an active internet connection to Tuya cloud servers for scheduling, so an issue with your internet connection or the cloud servers could lead to you waking up to a cold house (worst case, you'd have to press a button to set morning time temperatures).

HA or Home Assistant is an open source automation server which can run on almost any computer even lightweight single board Computers like the Raspberry Pi. It is great to combine different technologies and brands into a single management interface but can sometimes be a bit of a headache to setup. There is built in support for Tuya but it still relies on Tuya cloud servers. There are 3rd party integrations also which allow serverless control of Tuya devices but is an even bigger pain to setup especially for climate devices such as thermostats. It is however possible and once setup is the preferred way to control Tuya devices especially if you don't want to wake up cold some morning as you've lost connection to a server in China.

Zigbee or Z-wave based thermostats are probably the preferred option if planning on HA. Having said that I am actually quite happy with my Tuya WiFi Thermostats now that I have them working as I like.

comete

Roll forward three months I have a zigbee temperature sensor in every room happily recording the rises and falls in temperature when we manually switch the heating on/off in the house, and a Shelly 1pm ready to replace the timer clock tomorrow. After much deliberation I’m just going to wire in the Shelly without a physical switch and use a zigbee button as a boost button as needed.

To start with the main aim is to automate the temperature regulation in the babies bedroom (with other rooms just heating freely as the boiler is switched on/off), but with a boost button that overrides this for 1 hour before resetting to the temperature regulation.

My initial thought was to use the generic thermostat card so that the target temperature could easily be adjusted, but not sure how a boost button would override this for a set period of time, maybe to just max out temperature for 1 hour? Or maybe my best bet is to just have an automation toggle the boost button?

comete

Actually cancel that, I didn’t realise the generic thermostat had an off option. So this morning I got to work on the following:

Shelly 1pm replaced the apt wall clock that controlled the oil boiler

Put a sonoff zigbee temperature and humidity sensor in every room

Created a generic thermostat in home assistant linking the boiler relay to the master bedroom sensor (master bedroom is the room of most interest to regulate the temperature in atm as that’s where the baby sleeps)

Set up the following switches/automations in home assistant:

1. heating on/off switch
2. Switch to initiate heating boost for 1 hour so that the heating switches off automatically (exposed this to wife’s iPhone dashboard)
3. maintain temperature in master bedroom at 18.8 degrees +/- 0.2 degrees
4. automations to switch off the thermostat to run the 1 hour boost and switch the thermostat back on if it was on

I’m waiting for a zigbee button to arrive in an ikea order on Monday that I’ll stick on top of the blanking plate where the apt timer was that will physically control the boost. I need to also set up an away mode to flick off the thermostat when we’re both away.

From a central heating perspective the next step is to pick up some zigbee trvs for each radiator to make it as close to multi zone heating as I can. I’ll probably pick up a single moes one to test and if all goes well I’ll order 9 more.

Its less urgent as the central heating is heating our water, but before summer comes I’ll wire a shelly 1 to a beefier relay/contactor to control the immersion.

comete

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