I’m looking for a solution to make my central heating system smarter. I do have the following constraints and requirements:
I currently have a Nefit gas-powered central heating system. I intend to replace that with a full electric heat pump in the future. So my solution would have to work both with the existing gas device and the future heat pump.
I already have a Zigbee network up and running and if possible I’d like my new solution to work with that, instead of introducing yet another technology. This is both to keep it simple and to use open standards rather than proprietary protocols.
I have a living room with two radiators that I want to control with a single wall-mounted thermostat.
I have a separate art studio that has floor heating and I want to control that with it’s own wall-mounted thermostat.
I have 5 additional rooms with a radiator each, where I want to put a smart radiator thermostat on the radiator to control the temperature for that room.
I want no room to be dependent on another. I should be possible to turn on the heating in one of the smaller rooms, without having to turn on the heating in the living room.
I want to integrate with HA locally: my heating should still work if there’s no internet.
I did some googling, and I found some complete, integrated systems as well as some components.
Plugwise seems to have a rather comprehensive solution that can cover all my needs. There also is a HA integration. However, it’s a rather expensive solution. Not only are the individual components on the expensive side, they also don’t have a radiator thermostat with integrated controls. If I want to be able to set the temperature in a room directly, I would need a radiator thermostat and a wall thermostat, which adds up to almost €200 per room.
Homematic is another complete system that looks pretty nice. Apart from also not being cheap, it has some downsides:
It uses a proprietary wireless protocol, meaning vendor lock in
To integrate with HA locally, it seems I’d need a rather “hacky” solution.
There are also some components available that are not part of a complete system. This has pros and cons: Pro is that it gives freedom to mix and match, con is that I’d need to find a combination of components that works together and do all the programming (schedules, etc) in HA. Here’s some interesting stuff that I found so far:
The Aqara Radiator Thermostat looks pretty good and good value for money. Aqara also offers a temperature sensor, but not a wall-mounted thermostat, no floor-heating solution and no integration with the heating device.
Moes has some devices that look interesting and affordable. However, I don’t know this company and I don’t know if the quality is any good. Also, they don’t have a solution for floor heating and to integrate the heating device.
Alright, so here are my questions:
Does anyone have experience with Plugwise? Is it worth the premium?
Does anyone have experience with setting up a smart heating system with HA based on single components, like the Aqara thermostats I linked?
If so, could you recommend components for floor heating and integrating with the heating device?
Does anyone know if it’s be possible to use the Plugwise system as a basis, but extend it with cheaper Aqara thermostats for the rooms where I don’t need a wall thermostat?
I don’t expect anyone to be able to answer all questions at once, but I hope that there are people here that can at least answer one of the questions. Even a partial answer can be helpful. Thanks in advance!
The nest thermostat (not learning thermostat) supports matter and can work local in homeassistant (i know not zigbee). It doesnt actually need to be controlling anything you just connect it to power and have it pretend to control devices and use its states instead.
It records your temperature, your target and humidity for you.
Then you have aqara trvs (zigbee) that are automated to the same temperature target as the nest. (use the better thermostat integration for this, as it will let you set an external temperature sensor, ensures the aqara trv doesnt close too early because it thinks its up to temp… its right next to the radiator).
If you want to control all rooms independently smart trvs is a must for every room and then just have a control somewhere near (whether the trv itself or another nest thermostat). You will also definitely need another nest physically wired into your floor heating.
So in essence each room is controlled independently by TRVs. Then an automation says if any room is under the target open that radiator valve and turn the boiler/heat pump.
I use expensive but reliableDanfoss ZWave thermostatic radiator valves in all main rooms (these do have local control). No reason why these can’t be Zigbee alternatives.
It also has a virtual thermostat using the temperature sensor as its input and controlling the “heat needed” input_boolean
There is an overall “heat needed” input_boolean that is set if any of the rooms needs heat
There is then an automation to fire the boiler if this input_boolean is true.
This is done to isolate functions and keep things modular.
I then use appdaemon running schedy to act as the overall programmer, and a variety of the movement sensors to dynamically adjust the set-points on the various virtual thermostats.
For user-driven changes to set points, I use HomeKit.
Hope this makes sense. You can see the basic configuration on github though it’s rather out of date as I’ve now migrated away from using GitHub to hold my configuration.
I have good experiences with scheduler-component and its UI component scheduler-card for scheduling my lights. Glad to hear that @sender also recommends those. @Guff666 Looking at Schedy I see mainly downsides compared to scheduler-component:
It doesn’t have a nice UI, but needs to be configured via YAML instead;
It’s more complicated to install via AppDaemon.
In your experience, does Schedy have any benefits over scheduler-component?
It looks like it is doable to use HA itself as the main component for managing the heating system, with the use of the generic thermostat or better thermostat components. However, in that case, I’d need some more components:
Actuator for floor heating;
Interface for the main heating device. (Gas now, heat pump in the future.) It seems an OpenTherm device would work with most heating devices;
Wall-mounted thermostat;
Can someone recommend any specific devices here? For connecting to HA Zigbee would be nice, but WiFi or Ethernet would work as well, I guess.
I’d like to learn more about choosing the right radiator thermostats. I read somewhere else that the Danfoss radiator thermostats are much more accurate than the Aqara ones. Is there some more data available on this? Or maybe someone has experience with other devices than the two mentioned?
I can only address Q1. My solution has been in place for several years. scheduler-component didn’t exist at that time. I did look at it when it came out, but it didn’t have anything like the sophistication of schedy: e.g. the ability of adjust set points dynamically based on the sensors.
The absence of a UI meant nothing to me: the basic schedule hasn’t changed in ages!
One consideration though. My usual approach to home automation has actually to approach it as home augmentation: i.e. I am adding smarts to an existing system that will continue to function in the absence of any augmentation.
If I were approaching my system afresh, I’d probably go for one of the commercial systems to provide the basic controls and use HA to do the dynamic variation of set points.
I can answer some of your questions with my experience from last winter. I have a number of Hive TRV’s, (basically re-badged Danfoss Ally TRV’s) and Aqara E1 TRV’s. I control them separately using the schedler-component and scheduler-card. Each room has it’s own external temperature sensor which I find more acurate than using the TRV’s internal temperature sensors. Mine are TuYa WSD500A temperature and humidity sensors, they are cheap and work very well. To link the external temperature sensors to the Aqara TRV’s I use this blueprint z2m_aqara_trv_external_temperature.yaml · GitHub , and for the Hive TRV’s I use this blueprint ZHA, Zigbee2MQTT - Danfoss Ally send external temperature to TRV . I control the temperature of each room with the generic thermostat. All of the hardware is Zigbee which has proven to be 100% reliable so far.
I find the Danfoss Ally (Hive) TRV’s to be both more accurate and quieter than the Aqara’s, I will be fitting several more of these before the winter.
