I don’t have any experience on Home Assistant nor home automation yet. So I have some questions which I couldn’t find answers yet. All tips and guides are highly appreciated at this point.
-Brand new house
-Geothermal heat pump
-Heat/water pipes under (concrete) floor through manifold/distributor
-wiring cables for thermostats etc.
1.Is I/O connection board required for the heat control on each room, or is RasPi 4/computer working solution? 2. What are the requirements for the thermal pump controls? Modbus is the keyword.
3. Do I connect the manifold/distributor magnetic switches to the home assistance or to the thermal pump? If I connect the relay switches to home assistant and magnetic switch to heat pump, would that work as expected?
4. What wired temperature sensor I should use in each room?
5. Did I miss something important?
-Power socket control
If I will have 3-6 power sockets controlled with HA, where I should put the relay boards? Should I pull the relay board+control wire to each power socket or centralize the control in the fuse box area? Second solution would be much easier return to manual control if needed.
If I want to control a power socket with calendar AND switch to by-pass the calendar, how I have to connect the wire? I won’t use two phases and control them with the light switch. One phase must be enough. Those two input - one output switches scares me.
Ps. My english is retarted. So please ask if I could explain better.
Hopefully this forum supports editing this start post later.
Regarding your sockets.
I would probably recommend using external smart sockets instead. Having it done in wall is great, but will be hard to change.
Just pulling out a socket and moving it to the other side of the room is easier, cost might be higher though.
Most external smart sockets have a manual button to flip the relay.
It sound like you are trying to do it all at once.
Since you don’t have any experience of HA or smart homes then it will be more or less impossible to get it right on the first attempt.
Temperature sensors… Depends on your DIY skills. I would use ESP-Home and a ESP-board and build it myself.
Not sure what you mean by “I/O connection board”. “Who” shall be the room temperature controller? Do you want do use a DIY solution with a Raspi and relays?
Let’s say it like this: Some device has to switch the power of the valves (here it’s 230V). And some device has to calculate, when to turn the power on or off (=> the controller). This can be a “2 point controller” (too cold: turn on. too hot: turn off) or a PI(D) controller, that generates a value between 0 and 1 which then can be transferred to a slow PWM signal.
So: this all CAN be done by a Raspi with some relays. But you will need a lot of time until that works somehow reliably, I think.
In my house, I use a KNX system. The room temp. controller (a KNX device in a central place) has a built-in PI controller, calculates the PWM switching times from that and also does the 230V switching. But via home assistant, I can tell it some parameters it should use.
Depends on your heat pump. Some can be accessed via LAN, some have ModBus, some EMS-Bus… or a combination of that
What does the “magnetic switch” do in your setup and what does the “relay switch” do?
Depends on what controller you use. In a DIY solution, you are somehow free. Onewire sensors are cheap and pretty accurate, but you need some wiring. In my KNX system, I use KNX sensors that are built in motion sensors or touch buttons.
Maybe you should talk to some professional electrician who can come to your house?
For the sockets that should be controllable, the wires go to the “fuse box area” and there the relays are located. More precise: Every group of sockets has a cable to the fuse box, and 2 of them can be controlled if I need it (star-wiring with 5 “wires” in a cable)
One possibility is a shelly relay, they have an input port for a manual switch
“Home Assistant” is a piece of software that runs on a device, which could be a Pi, an Intel NUC, a spare laptop — basically anything that can run Linux.
Its job is to provide a central “controller” for a wide variety of devices: sensors, switches, lights, relays etc — although it usually isn’t physically connected to any of them except via your network.
You set it up first, and then start connecting things to it, usually using WiFi or other RF networks like Zigbee. Then you configure how it should operate with the data it is receiving: for example “switch relay A on if the temperature from sensor X goes above 20°C, and switch it off again when the temperature drops below 18°C”.
So for your questions:
Depends what the heat control mechanism currently is. If you already have an electronic system, it’s possible there’s already an interface to HA developed for it. See the Integrations list.
No idea.
We’d need a lot more information on your system.
Plenty of choices, from commercial Zigbee / Z-Wave sensors to DIY ESP8266-based sensors. The whole point of HA is it doesn’t matter: as long as you can get the data in and out of it, you’re good.
Good luck: take it slowly. If you don’t already have a device, get a Pi4 and put Home Assistant OS on it, and work from there. Work out a room temperature sensor first, then you can figure out how to use that to control the one room. Build it up gradually.