Hi,
I’m in the UK and have my heating divided into 3 zones (2 heat zones plus 1 hot water). My house is a town house design and the heating zone controls are on the bottom two floors. consequently, the top floor bedrooms can get warmer than I’d like during the winter. That’s got me thinking about doing something to control my heating. However, when I say control i mean significantly more control than what I have now.
I’d like to understand how others here handle their heating control? Given what home assistant offers does that mean I can mix and match almost any component to achieve my overall objective? That is, for example, use a nest of ecobee stat for each zone, bluetooth temperature sensors and z-wave rad stats to manage rooms and create zones?
If I don’t use a vendor specific solution (heat genius is one that looks well suited) can I achieve customized zone control through home assistant without need for a vendor hub or cloud service (which I want to avoid). Please understand, I’m not looking for individual product or component recommendations here but rather considering what my strategy will be. Fundamentally, that is whether i should go with a signle vendor’s components or not, or common networking layer or not etc.
All help/advice will be warmly received
Regards,
David
p.s. Note that I don’t even have home assistant installed yet. It’s only been in the last few days that I’ve reached a decision on HA vs OpenHAB…
It depends on your interest and patience in working with the items. HomeAssistant (HA) is a very powerful system that can do what you want. I have two AC systems, one for upstairs and one for down. However, during the summer, there are rooms where it just can’t keep where we want it like in your house. What I have done is use some temperature sensors (from zooz spelling???) Based on the temperature, I have the ceiling fans in those rooms turn on/off.
HA will allow you to stay off of the cloud if you want to. It’s up to you and depends on the components you activate in HA. If you activate a weather service, that is going to have to have some type of internet access to get the weather reports. If you integrate Alexa, that will have some cloud functionality.
As for getting away without a hub, that’s a yes and a no. If you get a zwave usb stick or a zwave/zibgee usb stick, HA can act as a hub for you. I run my house from a Raspberry PI with a Aeotec zwave stick and have been very happy.
Let us know if you have any other questions. We’ll be happy to help out however we can.
I’ve got a 3 floor duplex outside of Vail, CO with radiant floor heat. Each floor is a separate zone with it’s own thermostat with the valves in the basement at the boiler. The thermostat wire is old and brittle so I almost broke off too much when I replaced 1 of my stats last year. We don’t have cooling (though that would be nice) - I guess they decided you don’t need air conditioning at 8000 feet…but I beg to differ. Anyhow - my long term plan is to make wireless stats on each floor, for ease of use and WAF. Since my stat wire is reaching the point of unusable (and don’t want to deal with running new) I figure I can have a wireless stat that otherwise looks normal but with no physical connection to the actual valves in the basement. Then I’ll just drop some relays next to the valves to operate them as required via a simple nodemcu or pi zero or whatever. At that point I’m not sure, the stats themselves will have temp monitoring but I’ll probably have temp sensors anywhere reasonable so I can do occupancy based as well as averaging control. But once the sun starts blasting the house there isn’t really any control. I’ll at least be able to collect data and integrate it with outside temperature/forecasts, and possibly even UV/luminosity to determine exactly how to control the valves. The upstairs does tend to run away from itself, it can be 20 degrees F outside with the stat set to 65 and the upstairs will hit 75 in the afternoon with the Colorado sun blasting down. I’ll probably never be able to do anything about it, but it’ll be something to do
