Hi all, I’m a heating engineer in Surrey, UK — we do boiler repair in Woking and the surrounding area. More and more of my customers are asking about smart heating, and I want to be able to give them solid advice (and potentially offer it as a service).
I’m looking at openHAB as the platform. My questions:
For a typical UK combi boiler (Vaillant, Worcester, Ideal), what’s the most reliable way to get it talking to openHAB? I’ve heard about Opentherm gateways — do they work well with these boilers?
Can you actually read fault codes, or is it just temperatures and on/off status?
For customers who just want ‘Hive/Nest but with openHAB’, is there a recommended thermostat?
I’m comfortable with the heating side, but I’m new to openHAB. Any pointers from those who’ve done this with UK boilers would be really appreciated!
Furthermore I have a Heatmiser system controlling the Underfloor heating downstairs, and a Tado system controlling the radiator valves upstairs. These data are not shown in the screen shot
Hope Hp_heating you won’t mind me jumping in on your thread!
I’m also very interested in going down the OpenTherm route to get data from my existing gas boiler (Ideal Logic Heat H18), which has OpenTherm contacts.
AndrewFG, would you mind sharing details of the OpenTherm Gateway hardware you are using, please? - I’m a bit confused about the different modules and makes I’ve seen so far. I haven’t got an opentherm thermostat, just a pair of wired ones (upstairs and downstairs zones), so I’m not clear whether I could get the kind of data you showed without an opentherm thermostat.
@andrewFG, Many thanks for the link. So am I right that you have constructed the Gateway referred to in the link ( Controlling the central heating system ). It looks a bit daunting for my skills. Have you any experience of the ready-made OpenTherm hardware from the Nodo Shop as an alternative?
The OpenTherm Gateway route AndrewFG mentions is the most flexible option for monitoring, since it sits between the thermostat and the boiler and can pass everything through transparently. One thing to manage expectations on: OpenTherm itself mostly exposes temperatures, modulation level, flame status and a handful of fault flags, so it won’t give you the full manufacturer fault-code list. If your customers mostly run Vaillant, the openHAB eBUS binding can tap the boiler’s eBUS port and pull considerably more detail, including fault history, though it takes more fiddling to set up.
