Hi guys, hope it’s ok to start a new topic for me, I don’t want to hijack someone else topic.
To start simple, I want to start automating my home, and I’m a student so money is tight.
For the moment, and due to financial considerations I just want to start with heating. And just to make sure I am planing to start with 1 radiator and then extend to 3 or more.
Right now I’m using some digital TRV (cheap 15 euros ones from lidl) and last winter they saved me 200euros on the heating bill , that for me is a good reason to want some automation. Right now I have one in the living room and one in the bedroom. in the bathroom and hallway I still have mechanical ones.
What is mostly annoying for me is that I have to decided on a weekly schedule and stick to it or play with them on a daily basis. That is not fun as sometimes I get home late and they’ve started heating 3 hours in advance or even more.
That being said I looked around and decided that openHAB will suite me on the software side (at least for the beginning) as it offers a web gateway. I am sharing the public IP with a bunch of people and I can’t get direct access to my home router in any way (tried that), this is solved by my.openHAB form my understanding. which is nice…
Going on. As I mentioned, I only want to start with heating of one radiator (the bathroom one) so I can save some more money and at the same time learn openHAB.
I have a raspberry pi unused which I plan to use as a server. Planned to use it for OSMC but don’t need it for the moment.
As a student I was looking for the MAX! TRV.
my plan was to buy I cube and a TRV, a door contact and a eco/auto button as a test platform. But then I realized that the guys at ELV sell a bunch of automation stuff with different protocols, so I got stuck.
In the end I would like to have, for starters, door/window sensors (to stop the heat while they are opened), TRV valve to control the temperature in the room and in the end to be able to add other automation like window blinds and lights.
I would love to pair it with IFTTT and to be able to control it remotely from my phone and at the same time even have a button by the door for those times when I need to run out and don’t have time to go into the app and set the temperature in eco mode.
Now my biggest question problem si hardare, as I would like it to somehow be future proof but not to spend a lot of money on it.
Should I choose the MAX! with the cube or with the USB dongle? (max with cube is within budget)
Will the dongle work with the rPi?
Should I choose other other protocol like homematic, devolo (z-wave), RWE smarthome?
I would prefer something easily to source in europe (preferably DK/DE).
Thank you for the help guys