I have two geysers - a solar one, and a backup electrical one. Switching between them requires two trips up a ladder to turn valves. I would like to automate this.
It turns out that Eachen makes a wifi valve for eWeLink/Tuya/Smartlife that you attach with clamps to a water pipe, and it will use what looks to be a servo to turn the valve for you. It seems an elegant solution.
Now, I could probably build something that does the same thing, but here a unit already exists, and it’s waterproof and can live outdoors.
The question is, does it have an ESP8266 or a variant thereof under the hood? As useful as it looks, it’s also (in my country) expensive enough that I would think twice about buying one just to see if there’s an ESP inside.
I am getting quite enamoured with zigbee. The regularity with which previously tasmotisable/esphomeable devices are being wrecked by unannounced chip changes makes me nervous about wifi.
I mostly care about privacy and local control, which is why I use ESPHome (well, also for custom devices). I don’t want anything in the cloud. It’s my house, stay out.
I’m not nervous about WiFi, but I’m a little nervous about Zigbee conflicting with WiFi. I haven’t wrapped my head well around the technology yet, but they seem to work on very similar frequency bands. Sonoff make a zigbee hub, which I was looking at, but it weirds me out because I’m so used to flashing devices like that with ESPHome. I think I’d struggle to trust it. Should probably just go for a generic dongle and get my feet wet.
Is why I won’t use it. I don’t want that software on my devices, even for a little bit.
I fully respect that Tuya Local Control is a step in the right direction, but I am not comfortable with it. I would rather that devices I own run software that I can trust.
I can’t say for certain but the odds are good that you would be able to flash ESPHome to the valve you linked to as all the relay boards made by EACHEN can be flashed.
If you dont want to take the gamble there are six other water valves listed in the link below that can definitely be flashed.
Search for valv. For some reason searching for valve returns no results. Which is odd.
Hi @tom_l, thanks for that information. In my country, the Eachen model costs the equivalent of about a week’s groceries - not crazy, but not a casual buy either.
Thanks for the list of products, I’ll see if any are locally available. They all seem to be more or less clones of the same thing, which actually gives me confidence that the Eachen one will work. I’m only going on about Eachen because it’s actually locally available for me, all the others would need to be imported.
If I buy it and get it working, I’ll post a yaml file here.
