Just a serious warning if you try to adjust the heat on the boiler.
Below 55 degress celsius legionella bakteria might start forming, which will make you sick.
Keep the temperature over 55 degress celsius.
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This topic is about Central Heating. That is a closed circuit which has nothing to do with tap water. Unless your boiler has only one setting for it’s temperature setpoint, but most has separate settings for CH and DHW.
Your boiler might also heat your hot water for showers.
Don’t generalize things. Thermodynamically, heating with electricity is 100% efficient (obviously). While you will generate more BTU per kWh with a heat pump compared to resistive heating, how it compares to gas, especially price wise, is very much dependent on your installation and the energy price structure in your country. I pay on average 0.125€ / kWh here in France. I am full electric heating on everything (plus a fireplace I feed with my own wood). Doing this is a lot less expensive than using gas at the current price rates, even with the +13% increase scheduled on electricity for 2023 here (and creates a lot less CO2, since most of our electricity here is nuclear).
But nice post for the rest.
Oh and I use Qubino ZMNHJD flush pilot wire modules (ZWave) to control my heaters from HA.
I have two Eurotronic Spirit ZWave+ valve’s and plan to buy a few more. They work just fine. Best value-for-money (price was 45 EUR in The Netherlands though they have become more expensive), very silent, integrates well with HomeAssistant. Only drawback is battery drain, but that only happens when some other ZWave device decides to use the Spirit as a hop. Just heal that node so it gets a better route to the controller (i.e.: not using the Spirit).
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Central heating is a closed system. There might be legionella (or other germs) growing in it, but as long as the system is closed that doesn’t harm you.
For combi systems: When people talk about lowering the temperature, that is about lowering the water temperature in the central heating part. The temperature for the tap water is another setting and I agree you should keep that above 55C. Our Nefit Powerline something has the central heating temperature set to 55C, but tap water is still at 60C and once a day the machine will heat it to over 70C.
There is bound to be some heating engineers on the forum who can give evidence based advice on all this to prevent people wasting time and money.
Solid/liqiud heating materials may now become a much more common source of theft. I have fitted a sensor on the gate to my home heating oil that works by 433mhz.
I modified this solar powered door bell by connecting a normally open reed switch to the button so it tells me when gate is opened. This 433 sensor sends out quite a powerful
signal that my sonoff RF bridge picks up very easily through 3 brick walls. This then sends me an alert by telegram within seconds.
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I covet piles of firewood outside other peoples houses.
Look but don’t touch. LOL
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It would be nice to have a little bit more intelligence in home assistant for controlling the temperature.
Yes we can build automations, but for most “normal” user it’s too difficult if they want more then just time based automations in HASS.
Most things are easy to do with automations (or I also use scripts) because for climate it is usually simple If statements.
Another automation you could implement, is one that use a weather integration before turning on your heating device. Even on cold days, if you know your house heaths up by at least a little when the sun shines through the windows, maybe you want to wait turning on the heather until after that. After all, everything you get from the sun is free.
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Do you have experience with this already? It sounds tempting 
But in Germany there is only one weather website that I feel predicts the weather half-way accurately for a specific area (say within a 5 km radius). So I am unsure whether it is worth even thinking about this.
My heater is not connected, but any morning before turning it on I check the weather reports. If they expect it to be a decent day, I pull myself through the cold for those few hours (wearing a thicker sweater and socks) knowing that the second half of the day the house will be nice and warm.
Note; you only need to look at short term prediction. If you know your house will be too cold for you two hours from now, and there is no change in outside temperature you may just us well turn on your heater. Only when the outside temperature is going up in that time period, you can chose to wait.
A good integration for the amount of sunlight expected at your house would be Forecast.Solar. It creates a bunch of sensors forecasting the current hour, next hour, and solar peak time.
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I put some effort into optimising home heating with Home Assistant earlier this year, and I found that I could get most of the benefits without investing in Smart TRVs - “dumb” TRVs got me most of the way there. The only hardware required was to replace Nest with a relay switch controlled by HA. I wrote a detailed post on it here:
I have a separate observation about using smart TRVs to switch heating on or off on a per-room basis. If you are in a regularly-sized and -shaped house that is well insulated, then the benefit of switching off heating in individual rooms is small. Rooms in a house are not normally insulated from each other, so heat will flow between them if there is a temperature difference. Say it’s 5°C outside, and a guest bedroom radiator is switched off, while the rest of the house radiators are on and heating to 19°C. Some of the heat from the rest of the house will inevitably flow to the cold guest bedroom until its temperature is close to 19°. If it’s my house, then the guest bedroom will still end up being about 17°, which seems to be the balance point between inward heat flow from adjoining rooms and heat loss through the window glass. Meanwhile, the boiler continues to burn gas to maintain the temperature of the rest of the house, which is indirectly heating the guest bedroom. It’s not a huge win. (admittedly, if the house was poorly insulated to start with, or rooms were insulated from each other, then it would be a different story).
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Would be nice to hear what members here use for battery powered devices.
For me this was incentive to buy a battery vacuum instead of the 2000 w cabled devices we have in the home.
Also, made me aware I need to reverse the charging cycle for my other battery powered devices. Don’t charge when asleep , but when the sun shines. If must be, charge the powerbank for the handhelds.
One or 2 extra Hue Go’s. Looking good too.
We don’t own a home battery yet, but using smaller battery powered devices might help too…
Now where’s that battery powered espresso machine….
Evohome was the first smart heating solution (well before Nest, Tado, etc) and still remains the best, I’m surprised it’s not even mentioned in the blog article. Local control is also available through ramses_cc
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does anyone know a Tado or netatmo altenative for German Vaillant gas heating. Unfortunately OpenTherm is not supportet by vaillant in Germany. I use Tado at the moment but i kinda dont want to be dependend on the cloud.
I like how with tado you can controll your central heating and then also have a trv in each room to have more percise results.