A complex smart heating system, simply built.
Winter is coming, so it's a good time to take care of the heating in our homes. In this post, I will show how I built a complex heating system for my home using Home Assistant. I also have a secret agenda 🙈 It's to share my thought process when approaching
Why not wasting 10 seconds to write something about the linked article?
I'll write a quick gist for anyone coming along:
One gas boiler in the house, each room has a smart TRV.
PIR sensor to set room presence, each window has an opening mag sensor.
HASS has a general presence sensor set.
Each room's temperature is targeted based on presence and window status:
For each room, if person is home at all, and has been in the room for 5 mins, and the window is closed, TRV to 19, boiler on if <19.
If the room presence is negative and the window is closed, drop TRV target to 16.
If the window is open, drop the TRV target to 7.
There is a little more detail that that in the article, but that's the basics.
I like this, but I don’t like that rooms are cold unless I hang out in them. I live in an old stone house and I’d rather have a room schedule than a room presence sensor.
I’ve done something similar. I use the excellent scheduler from Niels Faber. I have room radiator TRVs. I have a helper entity that counts the number of radiators that have an open valve, and an automation that triggers when this changes to/from zero. This automation adjusts the central nest thermostat, converting it to more or less a posh switch.
My radiator valves use Better Thermostat and external temperature sensors, and the whole thing keeps my house warm in every room. I need to write a GH blog post about it, but happy to answer questions/share bits of config
Fantastic and well put together post. I very much enjoyed the read and have been thinking about setting up something similar for myself - though I'd need to get TRV's fitted to my radiators and even replace some pretty poor ones to get the most benefit.