Integrate the heating

SJS

I know I read something like this elsewhere here on the forum, but I just wanted to express my deepest wishes for some kind of built in schedule for the heating.

Right now I am making one flow after another just to get my heating set up, and I thought that this should be configurable with a simple app or even have it part of the system. I am guessing here, but I believe ANYONE that goes out and spends this kind of money on a smart home system ist going to want to control the heating with his homey! Even the "cheap" Zwave.me OS had an app that would do this!

Homey has all the rooms in my house, and homey also knows about the thermostats in those rooms. Homey also has multiple weather apps available (WU and Yahoo for example)

Right now I have to make flows for each of the following scenarios which is cluttering the system and would be WAY more elegant if one app could sort this out

Flow 1: Weather has changed -> if temp <12 THEN -> run flow HEATERS ON
Flow 2 (Heaters ON): if this flow starts THEN -> check if anyone is home -> if yes then turn on heater in the bathroom, in the living room etc. / if nobody is home then -> run flow HEATERS OFF (Just for good measure)

Flow 3: Trigger = House Status = AWAY -> check if anyobody is home -> if not then run flow HEATERS OFF
Flow 4: Trigger = House Status = HOME -> run flow 1 (weather has changed)

This continues with all kinds of variables just to turn the heating on or off and I haven't even gotten to the individual rooms yet that have their own schedule, or where I disable the heating when the room is not active!

Cheers
SJS

Rocodamelshe

Great idea!

(Long story about Athom not ckecking forum regular and stuff like that..............)

Best way is to add ur comments to the github feature request or make another one if u think this one don't match ur needs.

mveck

A good starting point would be to program the radiator thermostats, using a profile. Normally I would not expect homey to send real-time signals to these.
what I would like however is a way to respond on events like “if setpoint temp in any room” higher than current temp, switch on my heater. This would fundamentally lead to a zone heating system, without the expensive parts.

SJS

well I have the Eurotronic Spirits in my house which do react instantly. The "actual" temperature is given to the thermostat via motion sensors in the room which works brilliantly in my house. So the thermostats react when the temp drops below the setpoint.

My setup does the following (and that is why I have so many flows)
1) If the outside temp (according to WU) is BELOW 12 degrees -> Enable the HEATER flow -> RUN heater flow
2) the heater flow checks to see if anyone is at home. if yes, it runs the HEATING flow for each room. If nobody is home, it runs the HEATERS OFF flow which just makes sure all the thermostats are OFF

Fine Tuning includes:
3) When nobody is home, turn off all the heaters
4) When someone comes home and nobody was home, run the heater flow
5) when a room is not active, reduce the temp to 18 degrees

The rooms themselves have individual flows (Bedroom for example) where the heater is only on if it is a certain time, if someone just woke up, or if the room is active

As I said, this could be managed and setup better with an app designed for this purpose

Eternity

Thanks for your post @SJS !

Question: why do you use external temperature sensors (motion sensors) to feed the Spirits? The have measuring capability built-in.

I am in te process of creating zone heating with Spirit valves and use the built in capability, but also have sensors in the majority of the rooms. Eager to learn why you have chosen this route!

Thank you!

SJS

Hi @Eternity !

The "problem" that I have is that most of my radiators are under window sills. So the heat that is being produced gets "stuck" underneath. That means the spirits believe that the room temp is 25 Degrees, but the actual temperature is way below that. 

Now in my Kitchen for example I have to radiators. One is mounted beneath a window, the other one is mounted directly on the wall, but the thermostat is below it by the floor. I also have two motion sensors in the Kitchen. So setup looks like this:

Kitchen (Right Side)
- Motion Sensor (Aeotec Multisensor)
- Spirit Z (Radiator mounted on the wall)

Kitchen (Left Side)
- Motion Sensor (Fibaro Motion Sensor)
- Spirit Z (Radiator mounted under the window)

Now I have checked the temperature measurements of the motion sensors and they were spot on with a thermostat that I placed in the middle of the kitchen and left sitting there all day. THAT is why I use the motion sensors to feed the REAL temperature to the Spirit zwave.

I also do this in all my rooms. Since I have been doing it this way and not using the onboard temp values I have noticed that the temperature is much more stable in all the rooms.

Hope that answered your question

Cheers!