Does anyone have ClimaRad ventilation system controlled by Home Assistant?

Hardware
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Subject. We will install decentralised ventilation system, with several exhaust fans and, possibly, some decentralised ventilation/heat recovery units. I would like to integrate it into Home Assistant, such that, for example, when we are not home, the exhaust fans work stronger (noisier). Has anyone tried integrating ClimarRad with Home Assistant?

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Hi Texnic,
For 2 years I use a ClimaRad Ventura HRU and their MiniBox bathroom fan, simply operating in auto mode or by RF remote.
Just like you, I wanted more control over the devices, but the manufacturer didn’t explain how to connect them, except for a €€€ ModBus adapter or “leave it on Auto”. (We also have a small Vasco HRU. Same story, basically).
As you might have noticed, a lot of HVAC companies sell a similar shaped 868MHz remote control and folks already tied up their Itho units to HA using an microcontroller called ramses_esp from Indalotech with the ramses_cc integration in HA, so I thought that was promising.
Since a couple of days I flashed my own ESP32S3 and see info from the ClimaRads over the air. I can even control the MiniBox!

Currently I am writing some extra code for the ramses_rf connector in order to make sense of these messages and get them into HA.

So yes, if you can wait a couple of months, you can control your ClimaRad fans to your liking.
Are your units installed yet? And would you prefer to buy an off-the-shelf receiver or have fun setting up the hardware DIY?

Egbert

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Hi Egbert, thanks for the response and the development! I didn’t go with ClimaRad eventually, in part because I couldn’t find a way to control it, but mostly because the fans they offered were too big/expensive without extra functionality. I may get back to this if I install a HRU in the future. Need to see what simple exhaust fans do to home climate first.

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Hi Egbert,

Good to see that you are picking this up. Is there maybe a place, perhaps a fork on github, where I can follow your development of the ClimaRad control?

At this moment they are renovating my rental home and they are placing in ClimaRad equipment. I would love to be able to read the status with Home Assistant and find a clever way of control, that also utilizes some of the sensor that I already have around in my home.

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Hi Egbert,

Thank you for your work on the Github repo of ramses-rf.
I was also thinking of a fork of the ramses-rf (but also the ramses-cc) repo to speed up the progress.
I have the ramses-esp adapter.
At home i have an Sensa V2X, S-Fan and a MiniBox, so i think i can help finding the values for different devices, please let me know.

Regards,

Sem

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Hi Sem and other ClimaRad users,
The first set of my commits are now visible in ramses_cc 0.50.0 (in HA HACS open Ramses CC and select this “experimental” version. It catches the most obvious errors for Vasco and ClimaRad. David Bonnes is busy so we’ll wait for the rest to follow

1 Like
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Now the project ramses_rf it not maintained by zxdavb anymore, is it an idea to create a fork with all the new Climarad codes?

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Hi Sem, we might but I am awaiting who (plural) will take over from David. Haven’t heard from him lately.
Correct transfer might be important for the HACS integration to stay alive.

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Sem, I created a beta release from my dev branch to test the ClimaRad Ventura messages: here. You can install it in HomeAssistant via Portainer.
Could you report how your fans respond in ha/ramses_cc?

Egbert

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Sorry for my late reply, i did not get a notification.
I have installed the latest release from your eb-ventura-package repo, i think that is more up to date then the master.
I do get a lot of values, but there are also some values which are parsed incorrectly. Maybe i can share them with you and we can take a look how to parse them, the ramses_rf configuration is new for me, so i am not an expert in creating the parsers my seld, but i have a lot of data and reference sensors where i know the value of. I dont know if it is the right place to discuss it here or if we should discuss it in your fork on github (cannot create issues or discussions now in your fork). Please let me know how you would like to proceed. :slight_smile:

Oh and thanks for all your work you did so far!

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Hi Sem,
I took over from David Bonnes maintaining the ramses_cc and ramses_rf repositories this week.
They were moved to ramses-rf but that is supposed to be transparent to users.

Can you share your comments on the proposed attributes? Add your comments in the respective PRs on GitHub.

Thanks, Egbert

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Hi Egbert,

I have a Climarad Ventura V1x and the indalotech Ramses ESP dongle. Do you have a system schema I can test with in Home assistant? :slight_smile:

Thanks in advance!

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What have you set up so far? (Port: MQTT/USB, device_id’s alteady showing in your log? Then the Ventura is in that list. Now put all hvac (ventilation) devices in the block ‘Known list’, restart and turn on ‘Known devices only’ in config.
It’s all in the wiki with the correct syntax (quotes etc).
Ramses_RF 0.51.3 parses all Ventura messages to the log/screen. The unit can’t be controlled from this integration, because no (physical) remote can bind to it. A bit sad, but a delibarate commercial? choice of ClimaRad, nobody knows why.
To see the sensors in HomeAssistant, you have to patch the ramses_cc custom integration folder. Are confident to do that?

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It’s working, I had already added my Itho devices to the known devices, but wasn’t sure about the Climarad. After adding it as a ‘FAN’ 19 entities appeared after restarting the integration :+1:

What a shame that the unit can’t be controlled using the integration, if only for not having to use the crappy button panel on the Climarad…

It’s great to receive data from the Climarad though, I am looking forward to seeing what it’s doing :grinning:

Thanks!

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Yes, the panel is really crappy. Is your Ventura set up with a base flow? Ours isn’t, meaning temps & CO2 values at speed 0/auto are way off. And a daily 2x press on the crappy + button is required to pull in some fresh air.
Trying other ways to control the unit, low budget. As a last resort I thought of soldering wires to the crappy panel to IO pins of an ESP.

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Ah, that surprises me, perhaps that’s a model related difference?

My unit does have a base ventilation rate (25 m3/minute I think I read somewhere?), on the V1x it can be enabled by pressing the ‘>’ button for 5 seconds. At the first glance the reported CO2 corresponds closely to my CO2 meter.

I found the unit reacted too slowly to CO2 increases though, I have set the ventilation rate (‘ventilatie debiet’, as per the installation manual) to the next setting. I actually thought this just lowered the target threshold, and not raising the rate per se, but anyway, it generally manages to keep the CO2 level below 1000 ppm with this setting. This is with 3 people in the room, and I’d say under 1200 ppm with 4 people. With more people present it starts to struggle, and it seems the ‘max’ setting is no more effective than the second highest setting :man_shrugging:

All in all I am quite happy with it, the capacity is sufficient, but there’s not as much headroom as far as the capacity is concerned as I expected.

About remote control, the Climarad four-way RF control unit (“…for Fan, MiniBox and MaxiBox…”) doesnt work with the Ventura models?

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Indeed, that thing won’t bind. I tried several times.

Thanks for the help on the base flow activation button press; working already

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Good to hear the base flow setting works :slightly_smiling_face:

I have sent a mail to Climarad and asked them if the RF remote can be used in combination with the V1X. It seems so odd that the RF remote can’t be coupled to the Ventura V1x, while apparently it does work with (all?) other Ventura models.

Are you able to put the ventura in coupling mode? It involves simultaneously pressing ‘>>’ and ‘.’ for 5 seconds, the RF symbol (red LED at the top of the panel) will start to blink for 30 minutes.

I am assuming here that the coupling procedure for a remote is the same as for an external CO2 sensor, there is no mention of a remote in the installation guide. Possibly it isn’t supported, on the other hand, it could also have been left out of the documentation, which is very limited and not really aimed at endusers :neutral_face:

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Yes, did all that. And also contacted ClimaRad, several times with the same question. Odd ot is. Let’s see what they will reply.

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Climarad support states that the RF remote cannot be coupled to the Ventura V1x :expressionless:

I guess the only option as far as wireless control is to impersonate an external CO2 sensor and influence the unit by manipulating the CO2 values reported to the device.

This could still be useful. During the past heat waves I didn’t notice any effect of the ‘summernight ventilation’ feature (where the Ventura goes in bypass mode at night to let cool air in). I think it isn’t effective in auto mode because at night the unit settles on the base ventilation rate as soon as the CO2 level is low. The ‘exhaust fan’ is probably turned off completely, at least that is what I see at low CO2 levels now that I have the integration.

If you can trick the device into believing it needs to ventilate at night, I would expect to get a better cooling effect (I didn’t get around to manually raising the ventilation rate at night to see what that does to the temperature in the room…).