Hi All,
I’m looking to expose my Geyser (Hot Water Heater) controller on Home Assistant.
As it is essentially a thermostat type device, I should be able to make it work as a climate component, right?
Regards
Paul
Ps.
Here are the possible arguments I could think of, in case it is not a cut and dry answer…
The most obvious one is controllers that employ a water leak sensor in the drip tray of ceiling mounted geysers, which disables the Geyser when a water leak is detected.
Most other things map nicely, as essentially, both are designed to use automation to keep a predetermined volume of something at a target temperature based on a supplied schedule.
Even for possible future enhancements such as using the target volume and power rating of the unit to estimate actual power usage and/or as input to the formulas for estimating lead times to get to the required target temp. Also using those calculations to predict element failure, all maps nicely to climate devices where running low on (aircon) gas or component failure can potentially be predicted based on formulas or past performance.
Then there is taking weather conditions, guest mode (no of occupants) and holiday modes (no of days away) into account to calculate the deviation from the norm used for adjusting the target temp. Even this is applicable to climate devices.
Some municipalities has the ability to switch off your geyser during peak hours you thus have to set the temperature at such a level that everyone can have hot water without being able to heat the water during this period. The same strategy is also needed when there are known rolling blackout schedules in your area. However, this is merely an adjustment to your schedule, not grounds for a different HA entity/platform.
Where it starts to deviate again is for solar geysers that uses a pump not only for heating the water but also to cool down the geyser at night in holiday mode in order to prevent the water from reaching boiling point during the day. It should also be capable of defrosting the solar collector with hot water on very cold nights to prevent the water in the collector from freezing. The controller therefore need to keep track of the collector temperature and control the pump as well.
Using a pump to circulate hot water is also used in guest houses and hotels, where they might want to use some triggers to start circulating hot water in order to reduce water usage (at the expense of power usage).
There are also PV solar geysers where you might want to report on available power vs consumption by the DC element vs supplemented AC power.
Geysers using heatpumps should be identical to normal electric geysers but employing different formulas for lead time and component maintenance indicators.
As for gas and instant geysers, I don’t see people needing/wanting to control on demand geysers through automation.
Spot anything I have missed?
What is the final vote, climate component or new geyser/other component?