Correct. When the heater is “getting maintenance data”, you cannot interact with it during that time. This has been an issue from a WAF standpoint. We do have a few controllers in bathrooms. I imagine that if we were more “set it and forget it” type of people and just had the controller on the heater, you’d never even know.
Has anyone else ever portscanned their rinnai tankless? It has a ssh server running on port 22. If only there was a way inside…
I’m looking into purchasing a Rinnai tankless water heater. Do I need to purchase their Wi-Fi module in order to connect this to HomeAssistant? I’d like to be able to use my motion sensors to enable the recirculating pump.
@FutureTense Yes you would need the control-r module to connect Rinnai to the network.
We currently only have cloud integration, but @hokiebrian on github has recently made a discovery of possible local control. I am currently working on this now.
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By cloud, do you mean using Rinnai’s servers and/or Nabu Casa?
Do any of these implement install using HACS?
Can any of you recommend some tankless hardware? I’d hate to leave money on the table and overpay on a system. Your mistake might leave my wallet happier. Maybe I can get some cred for refusing to accept donations for my (our) KeyMaster integration?
@Explosivo22 Brad,
I got my hardware installed a few weeks ago and have been playing with the integration
I’m running the following which does start recirculation, but it shuts off (according to the integration sensor and the control-r app) after about 5 minutes. Am I doing something wrong? Shouldn’t running this code basically act like a schedule from now() to now() + 60?
service: rinnai.start_recirculation
data:
recirculation_minutes: 60
target:
entity_id: water_heater.n_wb_water_heater
My apologies for the late reply, but currently there is a bug on Rinnai’s side that is causing this. We have found a local way to communicate with the water heater that bypasses this bug, but I am running into a couple issues running it that way I’m trying to work through.
I am new here and I am having a hard time with implementing a service via a toggle or even creating the entity to begin with could someone point me in the direction of how to create a button to start the recirc pump even if it’s only of 5 min? The end goal is to make a couple of ESP8266 buttons for the shower and the kitchen sink.
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?
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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.
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