I’m tinkering with this cool project using Hassio Home Assistant to smartly handle when my boiler kicks in for hot water. The plan? Save on electricity by not wasting power when I don’t need it, but still, make sure I’ve got hot water on tap when I want it. It’s all about looking at the history of how I’ve used the boiler.
Before, I hit up a forum to figure out how hot the pipe gets when I’m using hot water. Now, I’m thinking, can I use Hassio Home Assistant to play with this IKEA plug, turning it on and off based on when I’ve been using the boiler? The tricky part is there’s this 30-minute gap between when it starts heating and when I actually use the hot water. I’m curious if Hassio can look at the past two weeks of data and predict this time lag. Is there an easy way I can do this?
Probably it can’t predict when you will need hot water. But you can use automations to crank hot water when you know you will need it.
For example in the morning and in the evening you will probably need hot water.
During the day if everyone is at work not so much so it can be on minimum. I use automations for hot water and so far so good.
The idea of this might fall into the same misnomer of “turn off the refrigerator when it’s not needed to save electricity”. A lot of studies have been done to determine if you shut off your refrigerator at times when you aren’t home or when you are sleeping and then turn it on just before you need it then you’ll save electricity and money (and I’ve looked at if that was worthwhile myself).
The conclusion, in this case, is that it is a zero sum gain because while your compressor isn’t kicking in all day long to maintain the temperature, it has to stay on far longer to make up for the time it wasn’t maintaining. And, in fact, what I discovered is that it not only is much harder on the equipment but it uses more electricity to “catch up” than it does to just simply maintain even if you have a relatively efficient device.
I don’t know if that applies here for a boiler, but you might do your own tests to see if you really are gaining anything by the effort to make it worthwhile.