so I bought an Ariston Clas B One Wifi boiler some time ago and have been using it with Home Asssistant via the remotethermo v3 integration. It’s pretty polished and exposes a lot of entities which is great, but some of the controls don’t work.
The most important issue for me is that the CH flow temp can’t be adujsted at all (even though I have a thermostat entity and can change the slider - just no response from the boiler itself). From what I understand I need an Ariston thermostat for that like the Cube S Net. I also don’t like the fact that it relies on the cloud…
My boiler has these connectors and my questions are:
Does the HA eBusd integration replace the Cube S Net thermostat?
Is there any simpler way to do this? It seems really complicated with an ESP module talking via mqtt to a daemon that then talks to Home Assistant - can’t it be done directly via ESPHome?
Do I really need any of this to just get CH temperature adjustment and not buy the stupid expensive thermostat that is probably just something like a BMP280 with an MCU talking via their proprietary protocol?
All of this is a bit confusing to me and I don’t really get what’s the most up-to-date method.
It did not replace the thermostat ad the Cube, the adapter can be connected, in parallel, on the same bus port.
The Cube has 4 main functions: configuring the boiler, displayng diagnostics and statistics, managing the setpoint and relative schedules and lastly is a room temp probe.
With the adapter/ebusd you may be able to do the first 2 functions and a little of the third.This requires that a funcioning CSV is either already developed or you create it by reverse engineer the messagss.
If you’re able to build the PCB and write the code, why not?
ATM, for the info I have, there are no other cloud free alternatives. Even the new adapter from ebusd.eu that has a light version of ebusd and MQTT client on board is not able to accept custom CSV so that rules out all Ariston Group devices.
The stupid expensive thermostat is:
purpose developed and built
tested with the boiles it is compatible with
came with a warranty
If you’re more able than Ariston engineers to replicate it’s functions, please share you findings!
If/When you buy the thermostat you’re payng not only the device itself but a cut of the hundred/thousans of man hour needed to engineer the system.
I see, I didn’t realize how sophisticated that thermostat is :))
I think I’m interested with the third option, as the entity in Home Assistant is called Ariston CH flow setpoint temp.
The CSV for ariston that I found seems to have done all the hard work thankfully.
While I have made a couple PCBs, I don’t think I’m nearly skilled enough to make a good adapter design. The light version of ebusd is very interesting to me. I think I found what you’re talking about on their website - micro-ebusd This seems like just what I am looking for! I see it doesn’t support CSV files like you said but I found this on the website in the features list:
use message definitions from ebusd-configuration (as of the time of the firmware release, either built-in or put on this webservice for dynamic loading as needed)
Does this mean that if I “port” the CSV config into ebusd-configuration it will in fact work?
I see that micro-ebusd also supports Home Assistant discovery and can run on the official C6 adapter board, which is just perfect.
Also, maybe eBus isn’t really what I’m looking for. While I love all the data that it provides I simply want my boiler to heat the water for my central heating. I watched this video a while ago and it seems that thermostats aren’t that complex. Maybe I could emulate a thermostat using e.g. an ESP32 with a couple of relays and a temperature sensor. I just don’t know how to wire it up to my boiler. I found an option in the Ariston app called “thermoregulation” and when I disable that the temperature bumps up to 90°. With that off maybe I could just control boiler CH heating in some way (on/off ?) and then I’d have a DIY thermostat. I just wonder if that’s maybe less energy efficient…
It should work, I have that adapter but not that firmware version and I have an ebusd container running so I can’t really help there…
The adapter apart from the ESP chip has the circuitry to octo-decouple the bus signal (±24v) to vcc levels, if you connect an ESP uart to the bus you’ll fry the MCU.
So you need an adapter, for the bucks it costs I’d go for the adapter already complete and functioning.
To me is not clear what you want to achieve: if you want to send the LWT setpoint to your boiler while it is running it may be feasible but you need to trick the boiler. You need to set the boiler to run at fixed temp then dynamically change that temp via ebus.
It may be doable I personally leave the day to day running of the HVAC system but I have an hybrid system with HP+Boiler so the system chose the right heating element based on outside temp, device performances and tariffs.
You can try it doesn’t cost that much (30/40 euros for the adapter, 5 for a good power supply and some wiring cable).
just thought I’d write a little update in case anybody is trying to do the same thing.
I decided to go with the TRV approach at first, as it seemed easier and cheaper. Before setting this up in my entire house I did it in one room with one radiator only. I bought some cheap 230V NO TRVs from AliExpress and wired those up to a Sonoff Basic flashed with ESPHome.
The second part of the system is a temperature sensor. I haven’t gotten around to making my all-in-one room sensor yet so for now I just have an ESP32 with an SHT31 in the corner of the room. Then I used the ESPHome thermostat component on the sonoff as you see in the code below:
Overall, I’m pretty happy with this solution, however there are still some edgecases in which it’s not enough. For, example when the temperature is too low outside it is not able to maintain the target temperature with CH Water temp set to 45°C.
When I manually increase the CH temp to 50°C it goes back to normal, however automating that with eBus is something I want to set up in the future.
Another issue I’m facing which I can’t fully explain is temperature spikes which happen on the SHT31 every two weeks or so for a couple of days. At specific times the temperature spikes to 26°C or more which I doubt is a reliable reading
The last problem is multiple radiators in one room. Currently I have the thermostat code set up on the Sonoff (I tried doing it on the temperature ESP but then it’d get confused about the state of the relay). But when there are more than one radiators in a room I face the same issue as I need to control one of the relays via Home Assistant.
I kind of don’t know how to solve this last one besides setting up the thermostat directly in HA, which I don’t really like.
