Smarter zone controller to replace HZ311?

[virtuald (Dustin Spicuzza)]

Hi! I’ve been thinking about changing our programmable thermometers with some smarter ones that have a more adaptive schedule for awhile… and finally bit the bullet. I just installed HA this week, replaced our 3 Honeywell T4 thermostats with T6/ZWave thermostats (was nice because it’s all local and didn’t have to rewire anything), and I’m excited about the possibilities.

One thing that I’d really like to accomplish is to consolidate when the heat is being called for. It’s an old house and it’s not very well balanced so there’s a lot of temperature variation in the house…

Currently, all the thermostats are connected to an HZ311 zone controller, and something I’ve noticed in the past (and can confirm now with HA’s history view) is that the thermostats aren’t particularly synchronized in when they call for heat. It seems to me that if something knew that upstairs was calling for heat and the main floor was getting close to needing heat, it would be more efficient to just open up the damper and let the air flow downstairs too – as opposed to cycling the heat over and over again.

So. That’s what I want. I could probably figure out how to setup some automations to do it by adjusting the heat setpoint (or maybe even just the temperature offset temporarily?)… but after some contemplating, I really just want to open the dampers, and the thing that controls the dampers directly is the zone controller. I don’t think I would want direct control (don’t want to accidentally close all of them!) but if I could tell it “hey open this one too” that seems like it would be useful.

Anyone else tried this sort of thing? Open to ideas and thoughts.

[TH3xR34P3R (Robert Koganov)]

You could do a setup like what was done here:

HVAC - VAV control via ESPHome

I have ducted heating & cooling in our house, with eight Variable Air Volume (VAV) control dampers that manage the flow of air to various rooms in my house. They use a system from Advantage Air to control them (on or off - so calling them variable is a bit of a stretch… I guess you could time how long it takes to open/close and use that to work out percentage open/close but frankly that sounds like a lot of work for little real benefit). Basically there are two central hubs that look like ethern…

[zagnuts]

@virtuald

Anyone else tried this sort of thing?

Howdy! I’m the one who did the project TH3xR34P3R referred to above.

@virtuald

don’t want to accidentally close all of them!

You will hopefully find that there are some areas that are always open. This means that even if all the dampers that can be turned on/off remotely are actually closed, the thing won’t explode. Don’t take my word for it though - probably best to check. Assuming it is the case, it’s usually common areas like the living room.

@virtuald

It’s an old house and it’s not very well balanced so there’s a lot of temperature variation in the house

In my case the house is relatively new (10 years) but the useless fools who installed the HVAC used two incompatible systems so the heating/cooling operated completely independently from the wall thermostats. It’s a large house, and we found that the rooms upstairs were always significantly warmer or cooler than downstairs with large variations between rooms even right next to each other. Although it is not perfect - it’s super hard to maintain a constant temperature in a large house using just one HVAC - it is a heck of a lot better now.

But. In your case you actually seem to have an integrated system ie the thermostats and dampers are centrally controlled - just not as well as you’d like. Still way better than what I had to deal with. Personally, if you don’t want to muck around with automations I’d consider seeing if hooking in something like an Ecobee might help.