I help run and maintain a Community “Village Hall” in the UK and we invested in a BEMS called HeatingSave to control our zoned gas central heating system. This uses either wired or wireless (Zigbee) thermostatic radiator valves, actuators, Temperature Sensors, relays to control the temperature of various Zones according to which area of the building is in use. For example we have a satellite doctors surgery in the building and when the surgery is on we heat the consultation room, toilets, corridors and meeting room which is used as a waiting room. In addition the hot water is also heated for that period.
All of this is controlled by an integrated booking system which has a booking calendar. From here when a booking is made, you can choose to heat the appropriate rooms and facilities at a temperature appropriate for the activity. Cool for high impact aerobics and dance and warm for sedentary events like coffee mornings.
In addition the system controls a door entry system that assigns a unique temporary PIN that is used by the hirer to access the building.
Recently we have had two database corruptions because the transactions are stored on an industrial SD card within the controller. Over 6 months we had over 51 million transactions which filled the SD card. To our absolute dismay the company do not automatically back up the database and we have had to manually re-enter all the bookings for the last 6 months.
We have invested heavily in this bespoke system and don’t want to change all the zigbee hardware and start again with another company eve if we can find one suitable for our available finances.
I am wondering if Home Assistant could be used as a BEMS replacement to control the heating via the Salus Zigbee devices. I don’t know enough about it to build ity myself but wondered if there were developers on this forum who would be interested in developing a system such as I have described.
I hope this post is not against forum rules especially as I assume Home Assistant is open source and I am sort of suggesting it be developed for a commercial usage. However I am not suggesting any payment is made for the software only the time and expertise in building a system. Any developed system might be of interest to others I would appreciate views thoughts.
Fozzie
There are different philosophies in regards to using Home Assistant for this purpose. Technically speaking yes HA has most of the features you are looking for assuming the installed hardware can play nice with them. I would definitely suggest an upgrade to something with high up-time, SSD storage (no SD cards!), redundant local and cloud back-up, and most importantly professional support.
The last bit is the most contentious part. Home Assistant was built for the home, not necessarily for commercial operations. It is also open source with no guarantee or support if something goes down, breaks, etc. Ideally you would want a company that is on the hook to make sure the system works. You do not want to be the one that owns the system, you will be married to it forever.
It isn’t the capability of HA, I personally think it would probably do quite well, it’s the support. Updates, zigbee disconnections, remapping automations, weird glitches, whatever may come up you will need to have someone that has access and knows how to troubleshoot and fix it. You can’t think of it as a one-time install, it needs to have lifelong support when things go haywire.
I am sure the village does not have a lot of money to spend and the thought of a very capable open-source system could be good fix, but a properly set up commercial system may be a better bet.
Thanks Tylas13 you make some good points. Unfortunately there are very few commercial systems available that will do what we currently have or what HA could do. Most are based around Hive or similar domestic systems with Wifi Room stats. Other BEMS systems are for much larger commercial premises like office blocks or factories which have lots of heating and ventilation systems to control.
I’ve taken on board what you say and keep looking but perhaps other developers on this site might have an interest.
Fozzie
Your best bet would be to find a local programmer that has a business to deal with support in this type of setting. I have a friend who did this for years maintaining a CMS system he customized for a gas station company. He used an open sourced CMS and tailored it for them, didn’t sell the program but charged his hours to set up this initial installation and then was retained to manage the system.
If you know someone in your local community has this sort of business and knowledge that may work for you.