New user here. Is there really no way to turn on away mode from an automation? I’d really like to be able to put it into vacation mode when I change the mode of my house…
You can call the service Water Heater: set away mode to set the water heater as away.
You would want to create a button that called a service to start the recirculation. You could even use an automation so that multiple buttons inside home assistant could all have the same function of calling the service.
I jsut set this up and it’s awesome. I don’t knwo what I"ll use it for yet, but I appreciate the work on it.
I have a question though What does setting the temp do? I changed it from 120 to 115 as a test and while the integration shows “Off 115”, it says “Currently: 120F” under it an the app and the unit itself says 120F.
(I have cycled the unit by turning on hot water and recirculation for a bit to see if that would change it, but it did not).
Not that I need/want to change the temp, I was just curious 
Ii believe it is supposed to set max temp on the ControlR app. It does on mine.
For those with the recirculating model, I’m wondeirng what type of logic you’re using to run the recirc pump to keep water in the loop warm.
I came from a traditional tank heater with the usual Grudfoss pump where I had it set to run 15 on and then 30 off. This kept the water in the loop warm enough to have hot water at the tap within about 5 seconds. The boss was happy with it.
As we moved to the RSC199iN, I inititally just set a recric event every 45 minutes (H2O heater set at 135F). This wasn’t enough to keep the loop warm enough to keep the boss happy. So I adjusted it down to 30 minutes. This is working well, but I don’t like the fact that it’s having to fire up when the loop is still warm enough.
I’ve tested a different rule that looked at the inlet temperature and when it gets down to 100 it calls for a recirc. This resulted in water that was a bit luke warm towards the end of the cycle. I sent it back to 110 and then the water heater is back to running every 25 minutes or so.
I’m also looking to add logic to it to detect if all of our family cell phones are away and then not run at all until someone gets home.
Anyone with some killer automations to not waste energy, but also not have cold water at the tap?
1 Like
also interested in this. have you gauged how much gas/kwh is consumed with your current config vs true on-demand?
I am running the RU199i and I don’t seem to have direct HA control of the recirc pump, just a binary sensor for the recirculation pump, on/off status. I am using the builtin pump control with a schedule and have the Recirculation Mode set to Comfort. So for my system set point temp of 120, it cycles off for 14 minutes vs 28 minutes if it was set to Economy.
Do you have control of the recirc pump through the Rinnai integration?
@56oval Hey Mike, I think the biggest confusion is that there is some sort of belief that the Rinnai pump can be turned on and off at will or that you can set some sort of automation that can control the recirculation pump. That is not the way your Rinnai works.
Rinnai forces a dormant period after EVERY recirculation cycle that the pump turns on, no matter how short of a period it came on. For example, in my house the longest time it would take to heat my loop would be about 1.8min. There is no way with any method that the Rinnai will allow another cycle during the mandatory 15 minute dormant period, according to Rinnai and there documentation.
If you requested a recirculate at the 12 minute mark it would start the 5 minute recirculation timer. When the 15 min mandatory dormancy is completed it would start the recirculation for the time left on your last 5 minute recirculation request, about 1 minute whether the line is up to temp or not! It would now force another 15 min dormancy.
Also according to the doc your example indicates that you likely have your water temp set to either 120 or 125. At those temps, in economy mode the recirculation will run @120 28 min or @125 24 to try to maintain the temp you selected. So in my house at these temps the outlet temps(in the water heater cabinet) would swing from 100-125F.
If you want to maintain a high temp in the lines you would need to change your system from economy to comfort mode.
The intervals for comfort mode are 14 min @120 and 12 min for 125.
In my house that keeps the water between 110-125.
You can set schedules in the Rinnai app for periods of the day that you want to maintain the loop for a specific time period.
In the illustration you can see the difference. the period on the left is economy mode and on the right is comfort. the bump in the bottom above the arrow shows how sensitive the sensors are. I opened the Rinnai cabinet to change to comfort mode and the temp from the room raised the temp sensors.
On the top you can see that the system is in recirculate mode but it is in its dormant cycle and the heat is not turned on.
@forevernoob Each time my heater starts during recirculation it is on for a minute or less. My heater uses about .08cm3/minute of gas. That works out to about 6cents/min.
During the summer I use about 1.1cm/day of 100% on demand hot water. That means if we want hot water its, siri “water on”
In comparison the conventional hot water heater that I replaced used about 5cm/day.
This may help 100000631-Recirculation with On-Demand Accessories User Guide.pdf (rinnai.ca)
Here is a clip on how to switch recirculation modes. Rinnai Control-R Setting Recirculation Parameters (youtube.com)
Comfort mode runs about 4 time an hour and economy runs about 2 times an hour.
I have created the following project to control my dumb water-heater.
1 Like
I have been slowly getting everything in the house connected to my HAOS system and started to look for integration options for my Rinnai RUR-199iP and found this thread. I was just about to try the github integration when the mobile app that I was using Control-R 2.0 was upgraded to “Rinnai Central”. Its worked well for the past month or so, but I just had an issue where I was getting “control failed” when I tried to use it. Called Rinnai and was told to delete the app, reinstall and it worked.
Does the integration work with Rinnai Central?
It doesn’t seem like it matters which Rinnai mobile app you are using since this integration uses the same login for those apps.
That said, this integration stopped working for me within the last month and I can no longer trigger water recirculation from Home Assistant. I tried deleting & reinstalling the integration and still no dice. Anybody else seeing this?
@NukeThemTillTheyGlow, would you be willing to give it a try and report back to see if it works for you?
Yes happy to help. I will review the latest integration and get it installed.
Just installed integration (1.4.1) and was successful with logging in, getting device and entities in HA. I added the device and entities to a dashboard. When I click on the device and get the temp range UI and clock on mode and then on… nothing happens. When I start a 5 min recirc via the app version 3.1.3 (160), it started up and the HA device and entries became active within about 15-20 seconds.
Not sure of what else I can do. I don’t have much experiance with automations other than some simple lighting on and off for sunrise/sunset. But looking to get into the automations now and start controlling things more, tying things together, automating various events.
Thanks for giving that a try. It looks like I was messing with my automation and I broke it on accident. I just figured out that to start the water heater, you have to call “rinnai.start_recirculation” service and give it the number of minutes.
If you’re new to Home Assistant automation, you can make a new automation, set your trigger, and then under the “Then do” section add a “Call service” action and call rinnai.start_recirculation.
I added a “Helper” Button and then added it to my dashboard to trigger this automation when I press that button.
By the way looks like sometimes my water heater will set the target temperature down to some low temperature (e.g. 100F) where my usual target temperature is 120F (presumably to try to save $). When that happens and if my water heater outlet temperature is greater than the system set target temperature of say 100F, calling rinnai.start_recirculation won’t fire up the tankless.
To get around that, after calling rinnai.start_recirculation, I had to run another action to set the water heater temperature to 120F. Seems like that might be a new thing my tankless does. I’ve never had to make a call to set the target temperature before before.
Hope that helps others as that’s been the thing keeping me from automating my tankless in the last month.
Thanks! I just set up a simple button on the dashboard for this and works great, confirmed that it started recirc pump for 5 min via dashboard status as well as Rinnai Central app.
Can the integration manage schedules, or at least turn schedules on and off?
hey i cross posted this on a related thread. Has anyone done this Control-R integration on this Rinnai Hot Water heater? (photos on original post) Or even something like it where you can patch into the board on the hot water heater and do some controlling of it or monitoring? Maybe with some kind of zwave relay or something. Or ESP32. I don’t have much experience with ESP but willing to try it.