I am extremely interested in the prospect to use Home Assistant to automate my central heating… My existing system works well (several large rooms; many radiators; gas boiler) in the sense that it heats the house. It doesn’t work well because it is hard to control which rooms are heated, and when… I have a mechanical thermostat in the hall (where I don’t care about the temperature) and I have thermostatic valves on the radiators - but I don’t want every room at the same temperature all the time. The boiler has on/off times for hot water and central heating - but it is extremely cumbersome and doesn’t allow me to set a realistic schedule.
I want to avoid the operation of my heating system being dependent upon the internet (in any way). Home Assistant seems a great way to achieve this.
I am struggling to work out what IoT hardware is going to be compatible with Home Assistant. I feel I need:
- Wifi-accessible (or Ethernet accessible) thermometers (ideally, also hydrometers) - at least one per room… so, hopefully, these will be individually inexpensive.
- Wifi-controllable (or Ethernet accessible) radiator valve actuators - one per radiator… so, hopefully, these will be individually inexpensive.
- Something to replace the thermostat to turn the boiler on/off as/when analysis of all the room temperatures warrant it.
My difficulty is that, while I can find advertisements for lots of ‘shiny’ devices that provide an internet-connected solution… I am finding it harder to find devices that will be compatible with an offline solution founded on Home Assistant.
Can anyone point me at a list of compatible devices? Any advice?