Ducobox/Orcon intergration Home Assistant

Hardware
1

Hey,

The past year me and a couple of people over at tweakers build hardware to integrate your home ventilation system HA. I thought this was a good time to share and collect some opinions here.

There are several parts that where designed/build:

The Open AIR Mini:
This is a controller for your ventilation system. This will replace the current controller in there and use ESPhome to talk to HA.
Example integration:

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Example of installation:
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.Yaml Configuration: Github
This will allow you to use any sensor in your home to set the speed, read out the tachometer, turn your ventilation system on and off.

The Open AIR mini controller works with the following ventilation boxes:

  • DucoBox Silent Standard
  • DucoBox Silent Perilex
  • DucoBox Silent Connect
  • DucoBox Focus (warning Warning: Original Duco Valves are not supported! warning)
  • Orcon MVS-15RH
  • And more, more info here: Github AIR Mini

The original wired duco sensors are supported! you can connect up to two sensors to a Open AIR Mini. All RF sensors/remotes made by Duco/Orcon are not supported

More info about the sensors ( is the amount of times they can be connected to the AIR Mini):

  • Original Duco RH (SHT-20) (1x)
  • Original Duco Co2 sensor (2x)
  • Open source RH (SHT 31) (2x)
  • Open source Co2 Sensor (2x)
  • Open source Co2 & RH (2x)

The Open AIR Valve
Since energy prices are skyrocketing in Europe right now, and we wanted to save as much m3 gas as possible we build valves that can be installed in Ducoboxes:

  • DucoBox Silent Standard
  • DucoBox Silent Perilex
  • DucoBox Silent Connect

This will allow the air flow to be restricted to certain rooms. I use it in my house to close the living room ventilation when someone takes a shower. With a complete family showering the total ventilation time in our house was +1 hour on many days… During that time my living room was also ventilated… Now I can close the living room and save $ & the environment.
Image of a Valve:
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Image of HA integration:
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Each valve supports one sensor to be connected.
The valves can be used in the following systems:

  • DucoBox Silent Standard
  • DucoBox Silent Perilex
  • DucoBox Silent Connect
  • DucoBox Focus (warning Warning: Original Duco Valves are not supported! warning)

The valves are printed in recycled PETG if you decide to build the valves yourself I / the world, would appreciate it if you use as much of recycled filament as you can =)

3D printed parts can be found here:Github
Assembly B.O.M:Github
PCBA Overview:Github

The Open AIR Foam
One of the Tweakers Forum members added foam blocks in their Duco systems to silence them. This hack/mod can be done very cheaply…

Before foam installation:

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After foam installation:
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More info can be found here: Github

Not all the Github pages are complete, and during the night/weekends we try to add as much information as we can. This will take some time… Everything will be available online! (schematics, Gerbers, B.O.Ms )

More information:
Open AIR Github repo:Github
3D printed files: Printables
Installation Manual AIR mini: Flamingo-tech
Installation Manual AIR Valve: Flamingo-tech
If you want one:
Air Mini:Tindie
Air Valve:Tindie
Air Co2 Sensor:Tindie
Air RH Sensor: Tindie

I’m interested to hear your feedback/ideas :smiley:

The Flamingo

2 Likes
2

Looks cool, shut up and take my money :slight_smile: to bad they are out availeble right now.

Question; what do you need in your Home Assistant to communicate with this?, I have zwave and zigbee sticks in home assistant.

3

Really nice project. I hope in the future, you can find a solution to also use the existing RF sensors to increase the WAF factor (and not having to through away my 200+ euro co2 remote). Should be possible by combining your project with Ventilation Gateway – Ventilation Gateway in some way.

4

Hey, There are back in stock ^^ These communicate via normal WI-FI :slight_smile:

5

we will do our best, However using RF requires significant amount of work. We are adding more sensor support first :slight_smile:

6

Looks really nice. Only one downside is indeed the lack of RF support of the original RF controller. My wife definately does not going to turn the Duco on using HA, she just wants to press a button… which I could solve by using a zigbee wall switch…

7

The zigbee wall thing is how i’m doing it aswel :slight_smile: Many people on the tweakers forum do the same. You could also fully eliminate the need for a button press if you use automations the right way. (Humidity sensor, Door switch etc)

8

F*ck it… I will just automate the whole thing :rofl:

1 Like
9

Hi,

This looks like a fantastic project and I’m interested to buy the whole thing.

As I still need to buy my Ducobox, I was wondering the following: the Ducobox Focus was the one I was going for as I can control rooms individually vs the Ducobox Silent who looks like to only have 1 airflow for all rooms.

It seems you have developed valves for the Silent too, so is my assumption correct that I could use the Silent to control individual rooms with your valves?

Thanks!

10

Hey BeeGee,

You are right! With the valve u can use the silent + valves to regulate the airflow from rooms :slight_smile:

Kind regards

1 Like