first and foremost, I want to thank all the people for the great work and help when it comes to Home Assistant configuration and tweaking. Also a big thanks to the team for creating HA in the first place
Right now I have a bit of an issue here with my heating system which I need some guiding with.
I recently moved into out new home which has an oil-heater in the basement. This heater is relatively “intelligent” in the way that it has some time settings which can be tweaked. Currently, it is set so that at a specific time in the morning, the heater powers up and starts heating the water needed for the heating system. In the evening, the system shuts off at a specific time.
I now want to change my radiator thermostats to the zigbee ones I have laying around. Before we moved, we had heating from the city 24/7 and I used a heating schedule within HA for the thermostats to regulate night heating.
My question is, if it even makes sense to have night time scheduling for the thermostats in this case as the heating system basically shuts down anyways? Otherwise I would just leave the thermostats on a default temperature, which in turn would open up the valves completely over night as the room temperature goes down and the thermostat tries to compensate by “heating up”.
Or am I thinking in a completely wrong direction?
Maybe someone with a similiar system and some insights can help me out here, before I waste too much energy.
If you’re already shutting the boiler down at night, then yeah, having the individual valves doing anything at that point isn’t going to change your energy usage. This is also going to be the lowest energy use approach, albeit, with no heat at night.
Obviously you could change to having the boiler run 24/7 and control the heat to each zone (like you did at your old house). Then you could fine-tune temperatures throughout the house as-needed at night. This would use more energy, but if you’re only keeping a bedroom at a warmer temperature it wouldn’t be THAT much more.
The boilers I’ve seen, here in the Northern parts of the US, don’t shut down at night. It is usually colder outside at night than daytime, so we still need heat, even if we prefer it cooler while we’re sleeping.
If the boiler takes a while to heat up, then I’d want it on all the time during the heating season, so heat is available whenever the thermostat(s) call for it. If it’s more along the lines of an on-demand system (doesn’t hold much water or have much thermal mass to heat up) then, again, just let the thermostats call for heat when they need it, and have the boiler start then.
Thanks for the insights. It’s along the line I was already thinking so for now I will leave it as is and just use the thermostats for centralized zoned heating around the day while the boiler shuts down at night.
