I’ve had a TADO thermostat installed for two years, but I’ve never really been happy with it.
I was tired of not being able to tweak the parameters of my TADO. I wanted to adjust the cycle time and minimum run times. I have a massively oversized boiler, so I want to make sure it can module down. The TADO’s min runtime is three minutes by default, which isn’t enough time for my boiler to modulate down.
Their support wasn’t really much help, so last year I decided to replace it all, hardware too. I looked at getting a first party thermostat, but as I’m hoping to get rid of my boiler soon, I didn’t want to throw good money after bad.
I am now using two Shelly thermostats to operate the boiler, controlling radiators and underfloor, and using the Home Assistant generic thermostat integration to control them. I’m using Aqara temperature sensors to provide the temperature readings (whole house average right now).
Excited to see how this performs over the winter!
My video is here: Replacing my TADO with Home Assistant
It does depend on what kind of heating are you using. I am using underfloor heating (water) which has significant delay. Using generic thermostat resulted in large overshoot for me (3 degrees or so). So I switched to using Thermostat with PID instead.
I did the same 5 years ago and created my thermostat using home assistant generic and Sonoff WiFi relay for my 3 zone heating system. For temp sensors have used ZigBee temperature and humidity.
But when Esphome evolved and also included support for BLE temperature sensors I have switched to ESPhome thermostat using BLE temp sensors directly connected to the esp32 relay board in case that homeassistant goes offline I still have heating.
Have added a BLE temp sensors in each room and using the average temp for that zone to call for heat.
So far my gas bills are very low in winter time comparing to other households around me and I have set the temp to 22 degrees at all times.
Used below relay board with ethernet to free up ESP32 WiFi for BLE scans of the temp sensors.
I have been thinking about the reliability side of things over the long term, so thanks for sharing this. I’d no idea ESPHome was so broad now. Perhaps there is an open-source thermostat hardware unit? If not, perhaps there is the possibility to introduce one.
For hardware depends what you are looking for, in terms of zones.
I have 3 heating and one hot water zones, in total I needed 4 relays.
The Esphome thermostat is a set and forget, no need for a fancy screen on the hardware itself.
The board I got is coming with a din rail box and can be installed inside a plastic project box.
Also installed in the box a 230v dry contact relay to disconnect the weather compensation sensor for when the hot water need to be heated.
I’ve had this in use now for over three months and I must say, the idea of using a PID based thermostat is gone. What I want to try now is using one that controls the flow temperature of my boiler, adjusting that to maintain a setpoint in my house.
Does anyone know of an integration that will work like that?
