I have a house with a Junkers / Bosch Oil Condenser Heating system and I want to get some insight into my consumption. My TRVs are already part of HA and I recently bought a BBQKees gateway to get some data from my boiler - Gateway S32 (Standard WiFi Edition V2.0) – BBQKees Electronics (bbqkees-electronics.nl)
My idea is to calculate the oil consumption via burn duration and compare this with further data like TRV states, temperature and solar energy.
I read on a german forum that it is possible to get some decent oil measuring by combining the burn duration with jet/blast pipe (is this the right word for Ölbrennerdüse) throughput.
Has anyone done this succesfully on this forum?
Is anyone else using the BBQKees Gateway?
I haven’t been able to figure out what all those values really mean. Some are quite obvious but others are really strange.
Depending on how you have your boiler mains connected you may get burn time from energy consumption. I have a Worcester Bosch boiler which is just plugged in on 13amp socket. So I put a TAPO P110 in there to measure energy consumption. This makes it very clear when the burning is going and when it is just the circulating pump. The below is a typical profile, 150W when burning, 50W when not. It surprises me how much power is consumed by the oil pump compared to the water pump, but then it is pumping from 30m away slightly up hill.
Before I had this, I calculated an estimate of burn time by knowing how many hours of heating and hot water burn time throughout an oil tank refill cycle, and therefore how much oil per hour of burn. I was out by about 5% on the next fill.
That’s interesting. Actually the BBQKees Gateway is providing burn time, heating circulation pump and warm water charging informations out of the box.
I’ve for now created a template that converts time into kWh as 1:1. I know that this is totaly wrong, but at least it let’s me visualize and compare the burn time via the energy dashboard.
A look into the manual provided some more information on the jet throughput but it looks like there are 2 burn settings.
Your idea about measuring the burn time via energy consumption got me thinking if i cannot reverse the idea. I have burn time and if i compare burn time, heating pump time and warm water charging time with my main meter I’ll try to come up with some PowerCalc#VirtualPower sensors.
It looks like there is a way to calculate oil in liter via oil troughput. The manual shows
stage1: 1.6 kg/h
stage2: 2,3 kg/h
If I divide this by 0.84 (specific gravity for oil) and divide it by 60 I should get the liter per minute.
I have 2 sensors that give the total burn time in minutes burnworkmin & burn2workmin.
It looks like burnworkmin counts the total minutes regardles if burn stage 1 or stage 2 is activated.
I’ve come up with the following calculation: total liter stage 1 = {{(states("sensor.boiler_burnworkmin")|float-states("sensor.boiler_burn2workmin")|float)|float*1.6/0.84/60}}
total liter stage 2 = {{states("sensor.boiler_burn2workmin")|float*2.3/0.84/60}}
I’m going to add those to the energy dashboard and in between try to check if the total liter value matches the total sum of oil bought during the last years.
Setup is done, it looks good but recalculating for the complete lifetime showed a 20% difference.
I‘ve no idea how verify this except waiting on year for the next refill.
At least I could check that switching of the heating and using the complete system for warm water only reduced the amount of calculated oil consumption by 50%.
The heating season has started again, so I think it’s time for an update:
The gateway works without any serious hiccups. The only feature that is not working is warm water one time charge.
Oil consumption calculation is in place but I still have no clue if it really will fit when I refill next year.
Implemented features so far are:
On/Off switch for warm water
On/Off switch for heating
Switch between heating programm 1 & 2
program 2 is my default which reduces/deactivates from 22:00 to 6:00 in the morning
program 1 is set to always on.
The switch allows me to activate the heating in special cases (eg. staying up very late)
Sensors for current & target temperature for warm water as well as heating
Sensor for warm water charging
Sensor for heat circulation pump
Usefull but not relying on the gateway:
scheduled TRVs with Scheduler Integration
script based deactivate all TRVs - in case the little ones have manually changed them
Script based boost for the bath room to heat up the room for 15 minutes before using the shower
Using the better thermostat integration especially to make sure the fireplace heat is considered
On my todo list are:
script based activation of heating program 1 (always on) that defaults back to program 2 after 2 hours
take a deeper look into the heat pump settings.
try to debug the warm water one time charge problem
try to use incorporate the heating status off all TRVs to switch the heating on and off
optimize the scheduled TRV times by using person tracking and school timetables (via the webuntis integration) & work calendars.
