If I may be so bold, I would try to avoid anything that relies on continued support. Your heating system should last longer than 12 years but Google’s vision doesn’t seem to! I would also though, avoid any system that controls my heating through a single wall-mounted thermostat.
I have been using the old EQ-3 Max! system for years. It still works. I control it through Homegear (open source and widely supported) which works perfectly with OpenHab via the Homematic binding. Below is a screenshot of my Main UI showing 14 rooms / areas all with individual setpoints and actual temperatures.
I can set individual rooms to auto, manual or timer and I can easily change the schedule profile of each room (which the Homegear binding won’t let me do) through MQTT (not through this UI). You can see that a total of 0.29 of a radiator is open throughout the house (it’s warm today). When that gets to 0.9 of a radiator, the boiler will kick in. At the moment the boiler is set to Auto but is not supplying heat. As you can also see, some of the rooms are quite a bit warmer (the grey bars) than others. These are facing South on a sunny day. A single thermostat has no idea which rooms need heating and which don’t.
They haven’t made the Max! valves for years and when one finally breaks down I can replace it using EQ-3’s new and still current Homematic IP valves, which OpenHab can also control using the same items. The Germans seem to be way ahead of us Brits on controlling heating.
It will cost you a bit more up front to replace all your TRVs with the radio controlled valves but it is worth the investment.
There are only two of us living in a large house so most of the time we are not using most of it. The master bedroom comes on in the morning and then goes off once my wife is up and about. That room is not heated again until about 9:30 pm (actually, in winter it’s not allowed to drop below 15 deg). The living room doesn’t get heated at all until about 6:00pm during the week because I’m out and my wife (retired) is usually elsewhere in the house. If we have guests then guest rooms get switched to guest profiles, the dining room is heated for dinner, the bathrooms stay on for longer and the house is made generally more comfortable. I can also control this lot via Google and Alexa.
This is so much cheaper than a system where you are heating the whole house, including the rooms you’re not in, or none of it. It has reduced my heating bills by 60% or more.
I believe Home Automation is about automation, not remote control. I can change individual rooms if i want to but I don’t actually change anything at all from one day to the next. Most rooms have physical thermostats so if you’re in a room that’s a bit chilly (my study for example, which is not heated when I’m not using it), I press a button and it warms up almost instantly (or I tell Google to warm it up and the radiator’s on by the time I get there). About the only time anything gets changed is if we go out and I can tell the house to shut down and then put it all back to auto when we’re on our way back or if my wife wants to dry something on a radiator and switches just that one on for an hour.
Happy to share more of my journey if you’re interested.
I’ve just realised that if you need to control aircon rather than just hot water radiators, then your mileage may be very different.
