I am starting to think about pushing my current “dumb” Danfoss setup to Home Assistant. Very interesting.
FWIW I have been told that my current controller opens for 20 minutes any valve that has not been activated for more than 2 weeks, to prevent the valves from gripping and the pipes from clogging.
Hi All,
Very nice implementation and very good approach. Very much appreciated you took time to share. 
I am also thinking if there is any chance I can get smarter home than the system I have today which is Danfoss Link. It works fine already for 5 years. sensors are wireless, it connects to wifi and has the app, it is cost efficient. Cons are - after I switched home wifi system to mesh network Danfoss CC sometimes looses connectivity to the servers and restart is required. This year I decided to try home assistant due to living 5 years in the house I ended up with 14 different apps for different things 
and also the only one from the family being comfortable with those different apps, UI’s and etc…
On top of this I am also wishing to add presence sensors in the rooms which in some cases have temp sensors and could be used also for heating control.
Currently I have 13 actuators that are 24V NC. 7 actuators in ground floor manifold and 6 in the the other floor. Local wifi or zigbee connectivity would be preferred. also to mention I have 230AC power at each manifold box. I would like to keep those actuators to reduce cost of change.
So the only bit I am missing in the puzzle is what relay I should by, there in the market I see tons of options and it is overwhelming some with RF control, some are tuya manufactured and needing tuya cloud. I would be very gratefully if someone could find some time and suggest anything specific, what would fit for the actuators I have???
Hi Lectere,
how is your setup working now when the weather got colder? any issues? I am planning on doing something similar, but came across some possible issues while researching. so i was wondering what is your experience.
Thank you
Adam
q1; No large fluctuations, it does ‘overshoot’ a bit, but that’s fine. The heat is not wasted. The overshoot mostly depends on the type of floor cover. With wood it’s big, with tiles it’s small.
q2; good question, but no, accourding to the manual of my heatpump, I needed to install a ‘Omloopklep’, excuse my dutch, but that translates to ‘bypass valve’ installed on the highest position of my floorheating system. That will guarentee flow;
One thing to keep in mind is that the vendor of the floor heat distributors recommends opening each valve at last once every month. To prevent them from getting stuck. For now I do that with a card that includes the last-changed option as secondary info.
type: entities
entities:
My valves are 24V NC too. I ordered this 8 channels WiFi board with the case. It worked flawlessly for the past 2 weeks. Once the wired or wireless and MQTT interfaces were configured, the relays and the binary inputs were automagically detected in HA.
No Idea on the reliability of the board, but it looks pretty professional, and not some low grade Chinese stuff. Anyway, given the price, I will likely order a spare board.
It seems that they even have 16 channels boards
Hey, thank you for that write-up. I was also searching for a way to make my pretty dumb floor-heating smart. Pretty quickly I came across the fact that tasmota includes a thermostat option.
So I have purchased 3 Sonoffs 4Ch (1 for each floor), which gives me 4 zones per floor. I really only use this on one floor, as most of the house is open-plan. The Sonoffs get their temperature via Aqara temperature sensors in the respective rooms. I think total cost was something like 150 EUR.
All the regulation is done at the Sonoff level including different heating strategies (ramp-up vs. PI) and there is hardly any overshoot due to the implementation of the PI strategy and a nice pulse-width modulation.
There is a bit of tinkering involved, but if you are interested, I can share some more info.
See here for the thermostat option: Thermostat - Tasmota
The 4 channel sonoffs are really a nice alternative, since they are very cost effective and have native HA support. They are about 35 euro’s each, that’s almost the same price as the Ikea Askvader models, one switch costs 10 euro. You still need the valves, temp sensors and also needs 9 volt power supply. Don’t think you included that in your price.
The Ikea Askvader option has a little less build time and has less wires. (no power supply) Also, you need some soort of casing for it.
The big ‘no’ for the 4 channel sonoff option for me was the power supply with the extra build time. (I normally earn 150 euro per hour, so time is very pricly for me. In other words, if I can save one hour build time for 100 euro, thats a win for me)
I want the regulation done on HA level, I keep ending up to the conclusion; I always have my phone with me, so there is really no need for any wall device.
You do not need the 9v Power supply. I already have 230v Mains installed (how Else would you switch the valves?) And use these for the sonoff. I had the valves already installed and they were regulated via a wall mounted thermostat. In fact you don’t even need a thermostat, as the sonoff itself acts as one. The big plus: even when the HASS server is down, it works (in theory). At least with the last given temperature.
The nice thing are the ramp-up/pi/hybrid strategies. But I would not change a running system either if I were you
The difference is just that tasmota implements the thermostat in the device itself. You could theoretically connect to it via http put requests. No need for a thermostat at all…
Thank you so much for this post!. Amazing work @Lectere ! i stumbled upon your post last night and it kept me up all night excited to achieve the same. i am in the same similar hour rate and job role except wiring (Wago is my friend) and HA are one of my favorite hobbies!
Your post made me go for a shopping spree and I can’t wait to share my approach with you!
I am in the same situation with a Daikin Altherma 3 setup roof / tank / wall unit. 3 floors with 10x 5x and 2x valves. My ground floor always gets too hot (Madoka thermostat in living room) and the unit stops too soon while the rest of the house is cold! Daikin setup is stupidly located on the ground floor which does not help on pumping the water upwards either (2x extra expansion vessels). regardless of the 300L tank my water pressure is next to non existent. This is my second house with a Daikin. My previous house (2020 build) was all on one floor and it was absolutely amazing. Did not need to touch the valves at all. having a Zoneregelaar from Uponor was almost waste of money back then.
I think your post finally thought me the ultimate purpose of a controller attached to the actuators. it’s much simpler than i always used to think. thanks for that!
Here is My approach:
3x 4-channel switch module from AliExpress (Link)
It’s equipped with RF, WiFi and even physical buttons. I have similar switches for all my lights behind all of my switches for many years and they are quite stable and integrate well with HA.
instead of EU plugs i’m going with a conjunction box perf floor and wiring to minimize the spacing and further push down the cost as i already have the wires (blue brown yellow).
The 4x main wires will have an additional physical switch before the 4x channel relay on the wire to offer another level of manual override.
I also already had the wifi AAA battery thermostat and humidity units from the image below in each room already so this was a no brainer for me.
I will share the pictures as soon as i receive it all and hooked up.
Couple of questions
thanks again! you rock!
Thanks for the complements! Adn yes, it’s really not that hard. It’s HA controlling the switches to get the 220volt on the vales.
Keep in mind that every zone should opened at least once per month.
Thanks for the tips! . It’ll take a while until i have my Chinese hardware on 
so eager to try it out. I was tempted to buy the valves from china aswell except power draw is times compared (3W)
Regarding the time those valves need to close and open. I have my thermostats on every 15 minute refresh so was wondering whether you almost n3ed to match the temperature check-in times of the thermostat or get it lower than 15.
I may go for a fancier one combined with presence sensors maybe.
Just a matter of time until they equip these wall panels S8E with a presence. They already have the temperature
That Tuya 4ch relay box looks nice, are you planning on flashing it with ESPHome or keep the Original FW on it?
Hi @Lectere , I read your project and it gave me many answers as we are planning something similar. Unfortunately, we are new to HA, and as for underfloor heating, I’m also a little lost. Maybe you could give me advice or explain what I need. 
We have underfloor heating but with a gas boiler - Protherm. It has a Protherm MiSet central thermostat. TECHNOLINE distributor - 11 circuits. Unfortunately, we already bought the house with this, and what’s worse, we didn’t receive any documentation for the underfloor heating, so at the moment I don’t even know which circuit is which room. But that will be a different fight.
From your project and comments that I tried to understand, I found out that I need:
Did I forget something? Is there anything else needed? Of course I know that I need drawers and similar
Regarding thermo-electric actuators - I read several posts about the fact that there are 2 types - ON / OFF valves and adjustable valves. Can you tell me which ones are better and possibly why?
What about ESP - do I understand correctly that it is basically DIY? Does it need to be programmed then? My husband and I work in IT, so maybe we can do something, but I’m worried if our knowledge will be sufficient. In some other post I also found Z-Wave (Multi-relay controller,Mcohome) - does this type no longer need to be programmed? Or did I misunderstand something?
My last question is about my central thermostat. Can I disconnect it then? How exactly or on the basis of what will my boiler know when to start heating?
Ended up getting another 10 channel for downstairs. No i use tuya integration and that works perfectly fine
Hi there,
I also working on an underfloor heating solution.
Instead of Ikea plugs I will use Shelly Plus 2PMs.
The generic thermostat entity is clear to me.
But need I (in my case) 6 entities in the config.yaml or can I create them in an additional yaml for a better overview?
I will use the generic thermostats with an automation.
Is it possible to create an automation with an input_boolean switch on and off?
if on then run gen.therm.?
which condition I need to choose for this automation?
This PWM feature looks really nice / what I was looking for!
Do you have any remarks after using it for a winter?
Would you be able to share a list of hardware you’ve combined (temp sensors / thermostat?, thermal “motors”, additional items, …)?
thanks!
Hi Lectere,
That was a very helpful write-up. I’m researching exactly a setup like yours for our house that is being newly built. I especially don’t want to have to put a thermostat in every room: a simple temperature sensor should be enough to then allow Home Assistant to act as a virtual thermostat. I also briefly looked at a Honeywell HCC100 solution, but it still requires its own thermostats as input devices.
Your solution is very close to what I would like. The only thing I’m missing in the description of your solution is how you process the signal from the heat pump when it goes into cooling or heating mode. What interface do you use for this? And what what if HA misses this signal? Can you simply read the current state of the heat pump with Home Assistant?
Lastly, I am also very curious about “lessons learned” now that you are a year along with this setup.
Thanks, my retrospect;
I’ve shared the automation to start the heatpump in the original post when one of the groups goes open, and I use the outside temp to determine it’s heating or cooling, above 22 degrees means cooling…
(I use ESPAltherma)
actions:
- if:
- condition: numeric_state
entity_id: sensor.openweathermap_temperature
above: 22
then:
- device_id: heatpump
domain: select
entity_id: mode_select
type: select_option
option: Cooling
else:
- device_id: heatpump
domain: select
entity_id: mode_select
type: select_option
option: Heating
Nice post! It looks much like what we did for our own house. However, I would recommend not to rely on mechanical relays and wifi or other wireless connections to make the heating of your house comfortable. We have developed our own piece of hardware, that can also connect to (wired) 1-wire temperature sensors like the ds18b20. It contains solids state relays, and all IO is wired to make it maximal reliable.
You might also want to check out the approaches for a PID thermostat; it can prevent your heating system from overshoot, saving you more energy.
