Internet Of Things / IoT / Connected Home / Smart Houses

Doh. Thanks.

At this stage I’m tempted to just go for hive and supplement it with cheaper zigbee temperature sensors and trvs through home assistant

I’m tempted to go back to a central fire heating the whole house.

Good one, I don't think that'll work in this scenario but the IKEA bulb thing is a good tip, I'll look in to it.

Installed my tado wireless starter kit today, surprisingly much more straightforward than I expected. 4 wires into the boiler and 2 holes drilled in wall to mount it and the rest was attaching the wire to the control unit. will be trivial to reverse when we move too.

so glad we didn't pay a sparky to do it. going to lobby the gf to put that money towards getting smart trvs for most of the rads instead. have two coming tomorrow for the two rooms i use most (one of which has a trv fitting but no trv so it's currently stuck at some unknown setting) but i think we wont get best use out of them unless we do at least 8/11 of the rads in the house (a pox on the person who thought there should be 2 radiators in 3 of the rooms. on the plus side they can easily come with us when we move.

I would have thought having the trvs in the rooms used least would make most sense (don't heat those rooms unless needed or minimum temperature reached).

That's what I've done for my house on wiser

ohhh I have a Tado question...

We have three bedrooms which are all controlled via a nest smart thermostat, however they all heat up and cool down at different rates, which is slightly frustrating as it normally means that one of the kids room is either too hot or too cold.

I wondering if anyone has used nest and tado together? I was thinking of putting the nest thermostat in the coldest room, so that it is firing up the CH the majority of the time and then using a tado trv to control the heat down in the hotter room? Does anyone know if this work work?

Does anyone know if this work work?

If Tado room A is cold, but not at a time of day you want heat, the TRV will be open, but not calling heat from the boiler.

If Nest room B decides it wants heat, it fires the boiler, and Room B gets warm. But so does Room A.

I think it would if we wanted the rooms we use to all be the same temperature but I'm in a constant war with the GF who likes to open every window in the house when she feels slightly hot which completely negates the benefit of heating anything (I just realised the cold draft I'm feeling is because the bathroom window which is next to my study is wide open letting all the heat out of "my" area of the house and she's just gone out) whereas I hate the cold and wearing lots of layers indoors gets on my nerves. so the areas I inhabit all need more heating than the areas she does.

with smart trv in the "active rooms" they can all be set to varying levels of heat and turned on only at times they're needed (study at 10am when I start looking at what work I have on then controllable based on personal pref through to evening, living room only on in evening, dining room/gf's work area heated based on if she's in office that day or not and at dinner time, bedroom on at 6-8am and after 9pm) and things like hallway, loft room just set to frost protection on non-smart trv and only turned up if needed (i.e. outside temp is 0-2deg and trying to keep chill out of house). this way around I can heat any room to desired temp and all others below that temp will adjust accordingly to maintain their own settings or not react to the heating being on at all.

it's exactly what I want it's just a pricey undertaking.

@HatBeard Are you really fitting TRVs and smart heating in a rental? Wouldn't it have been easier to just do it when you've bought your new place?

we already had regular trv on the rads but they're all knackered and in some rooms the top bit is missing and the boiler had no thermostat just the main temperature control on the boiler itself and the timer didnt work the heating just stayed on constant. we're also on a gas card meter and were using around £60 of gas every ~10 days soley on heating/hot water. part of that is it's a 4-bed house so will be more than we paid in our tiny old 1 bed flat but at any given time we're home about half the house doesnt need heating. as we're likely here a year it was worth doing imo

when we move it'll take me 30 minutes to unwire the wireless unit and another hour to replace all the old trvs and a similar amount of time to fit at the new place. if the new place needs trv fittings then that's something we'd have had to do anyways.

I bought everything black Friday so cost me about £350 so understand bthe financial pain.

Doesn't tado do open window/draft detection? I've started closing doors in the day while home alone so the heating is more efficient. And if my wife opens all the windows i passive aggressively turn the heating into frost protection for 4 or 5 hours.

yeah, it'll turn off the heating in the relevant room if the room is losing heat whilst actively trying to heat it.

in other news can ghosts set off motion detectors?

was watching a film home alone (not the film home alone though) and something triggered our hallway sensor which turns on hallway and landing lights for 5 minutes. nothing on doorbell cam out the front and dog needed a wee so checked out the back while he did his business just in case.

returned back to my study at end of landing where i'm sat now with door open, which has no line of sight to landing motion sensors and dog is asleep at my feet. timer turns lights off on landing and downstairs so all dark in house except dimmed light in study, then 5 minutes later landing lights only came on meaning the sensors upstairs triggered this time, one is hidden out of sight and goes off when going in and out of main bedroom at far end of landing where doors are all closed and the other is just outside study door.

am i going to die?

(it's not my gf messing with routines from the app down the pub with her mates either as she has yet to be added to it properly)

worry not, my guard dog is on the case now.

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Have you recently watched a VHS of a girl in a well?

Probably just ecto-mist, it’s a ghost form which appears like a swirling fog that moves through the house that can trigger motion sensors and make rooms feel cold. In the extreme it can thicken in front of your face and cause you to suffocate but for that you would need to be very unlucky of have done something to aggravate it.

You can exorcise these quite easily as they don’t like insects or spring flowers so have a zigbee bulb in each room and you’ll be fine.

Have you looked at balancing the radiators?

Does anyone know of a wired switch, ideally zigbee but open to WiFi if it offers local control, that can handle a relatively high load (10a)?

As I mentioned previously I’m going down the road of building a diy zoned central heating system in HA, using a pretty basic oil fired central heating system (oil burner operated by an apt wall timer, no zones, no thermostats, either all on or all off).

So far I have gotten a zigbee sonoff temperature sensor for each room added and currently recording temperature and humidity, but now need a switch to replace the old apt timer.

My initial thought was to use a Shelly 1pm, which is perfect only I want to retain a physical switch with an indicator light to show when it’s on, and this becomes very slightly more complicated. There are of course plenty of zigbee light switches that would be perfect, only I don’t think they’d handle the starting load of the burner when it fires up.

Anything I am missing?

Use your favourite low current but mains controlling thing and add a contactor, eg https://www.screwfix.com/p/british-general-fortress-20a-dp-contactor-no/6654P

That’s an idea of course, however I was looking for a slightly neater solution as it’s on wall in our kitchen and adding additional electrical boxes might upset the boss.

This isn't a switch but a switch can be wired to it. Claims to handle 10A (Although I don't think it's particularly different from the Shelly 1pm)
https://smile.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B08RYT9XGL

Not sure about an indicator light though. I think your easiest option there would be to have a separate indicator controlled by HA or rather than an actual switch something like this https://thepihut.com/collections/raspberry-pi-cases/products/az-touch-pi-zero-wall-mounting-touchscreen-set with a Pi wall mounted and a HA dashboard that allows you to turn the heating on and off and indicates its current state.

I guess my worry with using an automation to trigger an independent indicator light is that I don’t fully trust home assistant to always trigger and execute an automation without fail, and what happens if for some reason the indicator light doesn’t come on and we end up leaving the heating on all night and draining the oil tank.

Maybe an appliance switch with an LED might work.

I keep coming back to this one but there are a couple of barriers that stop me from pulling the trigger:

1. They won’t ship to Ireland (not a major problem, can have a mate in London ship it to me, just an extra layer of effort)
   
2. It’s tuya based (again, I think it’s possible to overcome that with local tuya, but I’ve read reports of that integration crashing occasionally)
   
3. I can’t help but think there is a more simple and more cost effective solution
   

It’s tuya based

Can't you convert tuya relatively easily? Using tuyaconvert, no less.

(Chip dependent, of course)