Hi Guys,
I Would like to ask about any recommendation what hardware I should choose to my new system. I will do general refurbishment of my house and I’m not sure what will be the best for lights , heating , floor heating etc. I’m wondering what I should use for hub ? Samsung smartthings or Raspberry Pi with RFLink and Openhub or something similar ? What oil boiler will be the best option for control over smart hub ?
Regards
Marek
Hello @Marek_Palma
Lights:
LEDs with RGBW… In stripes, bulbs, and up and down lights.
Try to use as less as possible vendors and or technics.
Heating:
If you can choose, take an area heating (floor, wall, roof)
Oil Boilers are hardly to be controlled. Maybe you can monitor them.
Hi @Marek_Palma
You dont say where you are located as the answer might be quite different from country to country.
I live in the UK in an area where the only heating options are oil (expensive), bottled gas (very expensive) and electricity (extremely expensive) Heat pumps and solar, sadly are not an option for me.
Oil boilers didnt seem to offer much in the way of technology when we replaced ours 3 years ago so we went with a Grant Vortex system boiler and a Geo360 weather compensating controller. (I have no idea whether the latter is a benefit or not - it is impenetrable!)
I have taken a simple and cheap solution and control my boiler’s on and off times using a Belkin WeMo switch and the radiators with MaxEQ thermostatic radiator valves. This certainly gives me a lot of control both at home and when away.
In addition I have set up my own temperature monitoring every 5 minutes in key rooms and also outdoors using simple sensors and a Raspberry Pi. So now I know how quickly each room heats up.
The biggest issue for me is that I have very little idea how much oil I am using on a day to day basis which would seem key to saving money. I have tried experimenting with an ultrasonic depth gauge on the oil tank but as is a really weird shape I dont trust the results. Ideally I would really like a (cheap) inline flow meter or something like that.
Only just installed OpenHAB and it has found all my devices so I just need to work out the best way to use OpenHAB with them.
Really looking forward to other responses - I hope I can learn something from them!