I’m completely new to Home Assistant and smart homes in general, but have 20+ years of software engineering background. (Also a bit of hobby-level knowledge of building analog/digital hardware.)
I’m planning to replace the dumb thermostat of a central gas heating of my house. The house does not have any sort of smart home infrastructure set up yet.
What I want for now is:
A basic wireless wall-mounted thermostat (measures and displays room temperature, allows setting desired temperature). Ideally the simplest possible display, preferably no touch screen and no touch buttons.
A wireless relay that controls the central gas heating (the system receives an on/off signal via a 230V AC cable)
An “internet gateway” that connects to the LAN and WAN uplink via WiFi or Ethernet.
I might add controllers to individual room radiators as well but this is optional for now.
In the future I might add air condition, solar panels or other stuff to the system, but for now my needs are pretty simple. If someone has pointers to specific hardware or guides on “getting started from scratch and keeping it simple”, I’d much appreciate advice.
I ask because I am in the UK and use the Hive system (which has everything you describe), but they pulled out of the US last year. It does have a touch screen, but can be controlled via their app. It’s a cloud gateway to HomeAssistant, but can also be controlled locally via Z2M (but I have not tried this myself yet - waiting for the weather to warm up first!).
Not sure if that’s obvious here, but I want to buy things that can also operate without the vendor-specific cloud, for privacy reasons, but also in case they go out of business.
Right! …that’s why I mentioned local control over Z2M which means no hub/cloud required
I only mentioned the hub because you you wrote about an internet gateway as part of your spec.
Having written that, Hive is a UK based company, so may not be appropriate for you anyway.
Although Hive UK’s website does not say whether they ship to the EU, I’ve found that Amazon and other shops do ship Hive devices. That’s a good lead.
Another noob question: if I go with setting Home Assistant, do I need a “smart” thermostat, or can I defer the “when to turn on the heating” decisions to HA?
Hi marton_s, you have to pay attention to the way your heater/current thermostat works.
If it’s a system with different heating levels and not just on/off you will lose efficiency.
To phrase my wishes differently, I’m actually looking into the same functionality the existing thermostat offers plus the ability of controlling it over LAN/WAN. Does not even need to be “cloud” controlled as I can set up a VPN to “dial in” when I’m not home and want to control the heating system. And once I am at it, I’d of course want something that can be extended with a range of other smart features, which is how I arrived to Home Assistant…
So whatever you add to HA, being ethernet, WiFi, zigbee or zwave, it will be controllable from HA from LAN/WAN.
There are simple thermostats integrations/cards that can replace a thermostat so you use HA to control your heating.
It all depends what kind of reading/control you wish to have apart from HA.
There are sensors that measure the temperature and expose them with a mini display.
I have a few simple temperature sensors that show me the temperature only in HA.
Right, that’s the direction I want to take. Essentially a single, dumb wall mounted unit that has a temperature sensor and display and some simple means of temperature control.
I’m undecided how DYI I’m gonna go for the whole system, but not planned DYI for the thermostat yet. But I have no idea what’s available off-shelf, I might decide that nothing is available that exactly suits my needs and I build myself.
If I go full DIY I might do it proper and build something with an analog display and fully mechanical controls. Or use Nixie tubes. That would be sweet
As for “Simple Heating Control” you can use any temperature-device which are homeassistant compliant ( as a thermostat ) there are several brands zigbee devices ( wireless, battery driven ) .
As for the the " on/off " switch for your gas-heater , use any wifi-switch/plug
Then create automations … i.e " if temp livingroom below X, turn on heater , if temp >=Y turn of heater"
PS: simplified example, as you need some “security / functionality” factors included in your automations as well
Questions is whether you want battery-driven temperature-device , and if it should be wifi/zigbee/bluetooth
Battery-driven basically rules out Wifi and bluetooth , left is Zigbee temperature devices
For this Switch/plug wifi should do / zigbee’s available as-well
EDIT: As you “current” computherm is “overkill” i base upon the fact that you has a “gas-heater” with “only” a on/off switch … that doesn’t leave much to “regulate”
Not sure of this topic is still relevant, I am in the same situation.
I am currently thinking of going with a Shelly Plus H&T and a Shelly Plus 1 as my switch. Both have excelent auport in home assistant.
The H&T will push temperatures to my HA and using the Generic thermostat from HA it can decide when to trigger the heating on(the shelly plus).
It depends mostly on the available wiring and your furnace/boiler type.
Where I live most of the boilers needs dry contacts to start not live 230v.
If possible I’d go for a purpose built thermostat with WiFi capabilities.
In this way you can leave the day to day operations to the thermostat (and anyone in the house can manage it). With home automation used only to do reporting and smart things (eg away mode when no one is at home, raise temps on special needs etc).
There are many possibilities.
If you have wires from the boiler to the thermostat location you can use a built in smart thermostat. There are many around from basic BECA tuya devices to more complex and cosltly. I’d take a look at MC6 devices.
If you need remote switch to start the boiler I’d look at something like Tado.
The diy way is probably the most flexible but remember that the comfort of your home will be handled by your implementation. If you think of using HA to manage the climate you should think very seriously at the resilience of your setup.
Coming home in a cold winter day and finding the house freezing for a busted SD card is something I’d try to avoid…
One day perhaps I get around to it But with newly build homes with a dry contact heating system there is a master-master system installed.
So converting this to a single master-slave system is usually not a problem.
With this though, all bedrooms and or other rooms that used to have a thermostat, now have a whole in the wall with a cable going to the infloor zone controller.
all well and good but it would be nice to have a simple esp temp/hum sensor that connects to another esp over esp-now with some data and the master esp reporting to HA
Now each room can have a “thermostat” that works even if i leave or sell the house.
Oh and dont forget the heatpumps these days, they communicate heating / cooling mode/ night time mode all with shorting +24V to ground or some other combination of this.
I have yet to find a off the shelf thermostat system that will allow me to do this all
I have a fairly complex system with boiler, heat pump, hydronic underfloor heating and fan oils.
Luckily my boiler +hp can be managed tapping into the proprietary bus messages, the underfloor pump is managed by a smart switch and I was able to find smart thermostats for my FC.
But.
I left all the normal day to day ops to the inbuilt logic. The programming is done on the inbuilt thermostat. The FC are autonomous as they have temp probe on the water temp, thus they start operating without HA involvement.
HA apart from reporting does “smart” things eg. Turn on cooling when my PV system is feeding too much power to the grid in summer and tries to use all the PV power produced during the days in winter boosting HP usage…
I don’t rely on HA for anything basic. As an example ATM I’m away from home on vacation and was able to make a really dumb operation via VPN and locked myself out…
