Hi,
I want to control heating per room (Smart Heating, Multi Zone Heating)
I live in the Netherlands (Europe) and have remeha avanta boiler with several radiator’s on the wall in different rooms
I’m a openhab user so that’s way I start asking my question’s in this forum first (don’t know if it’s the right place)
I see a lot if z-wave radiator valves on the market from different brands
Like Devolo, Danfoss, Smartwares ect.
But you need something to control the heat question ( the valves need to tell the boiler I want hot water)
I have seen complete systems like danfoss link cc, evohome Honeywell and Innogy SmartHome
They all consist of a base station, a module that controls the boiler and one or more z-wave radiator valves
the above mentioned systems are all closed (they use their own z-wave protocol)
The evohome system is sort of hacked and someone build a API for it.
Now I found another system called Heatapp! (http://heatapp.de)
It’s more open (regular z-wave) and has a local web interface so you don’t have to control it through an external server.
Some questions are:
I already have a z-wave network, can 2 z-wave networks coexist in the same home?
Can a z-wave product (in this case a z-wave radiator valve) be part of two z-wave networks?
Has anybody experiences with heating per room?
I love the hear you experiences.
What system are you using and how do you control it!
At a first view heatapp looks like they only “combine” some sensors and actors together. Which looks interessting, if you don’t own a smart environment.
If you have already a zwave environment, I would use this for the controlling.
The biggest point is the controlling of the boiler (which is optional at heatapp and depends on the interfaces of your boiler).
If your boiler-controlling is intelligent enough, it can produce only the amount of heat, you need.
Im at a identical point.
I have a old oil-boiler which have not really an intelligent controlling.
I will controll my rooms with the multisensors an valves for every room.
To reduce the start-stop cycles I’ll play with the “Heizkurve” and day-night-regulation.
I hope this input helps you a little bit
Michael
(For further information please provide some details about your heating)
I have used KNX or GPIO for multizone heating control. The KNX environment provides a very stable out of the box solution for such applications and OH only monitors and controls the systems if wanted. Depending on manufacturers you will find multiple ways for controlling an application like that (PI control, PID control).
With GPIO I went further and tuned my own control for multi zone, for me it has been nicer because it gave me complete control on what is happening (yes I am a control freak).
The multi zone climate control can be tricky sometimes for beginners - there are many variables that you have to account for (heating and cooling modes, confort/standby/night modes, deadzone, etc).
at the moment i have Intel NUC with openhab 2 and a z-wave usb stick and a rfxcom module
I agree that the best thing is to have everything in one (z-wave) network, but that is also a single point of failure
But heating (for me) is to important to mess with. and systems like I mentioned above have everything i need (on paper)
in the netherlands we have mostly two types of boilers: on/off and Opentherm protocol. I can use both types.
And if you build your own system, there is always the risk that it does not work well together.
On paper Heatapp looks like an open system that I can integrate in Openhab. (and in my existing z-wave network when my knowledge progresses)
If i look at the stores in holland that sells Heatapp, the part that communicates with the boiler is not optional but rather mandatory
and Heatapp has a Self-learning function , i don’t know how to create this in openhab (example: I want my room a certain temperature at 12 o’clock)
A smart system can learing this. and making heating schedules in openhab is niet so easy for me
i’m leaning towards a system that can do its work autonomously and I can control from Openhab (like the philips hue bridge)
thoughts on this and potential pitfalls are welcome.
I also live in Holland. I use the innogy (rwe smarthome) solution with a base station, controlled radiator valves and a power outlet switch +24v(?) power adapter. The 24v is connected to your boiler, and the outletswitch turns the 230V side On when heating is required. Please note that you can only use the on /off and not the opentherm input on your boiler.
I found your topic on the web and read about your experience.
Right now I am in a similar situation, but I already placed a Fibaro Z-wave system with thermostatic z-wave valves on every radiator and some more sensors inside the house. Everything was working fine with the old gas boiler (ON/OFF), but when they installed the new heatpump (Elga 304) and it is only OpenTherm, things got very complicated. There is no easy solution on the market that can communicate with both Opentherm and Z-wave effectively (maybe this Heatapp, but both devices cost about 600 euro, too much for what I need).
Thing is, I do not want to use any gateways since I have a multi-zone system. That’s why it has to be a opentherm controller for the boiler that has Z-wave capability so I can control it using data from all the rooms
I don’t understand that. What does using a gateway have to do with a multi-zone system ?
You don’t need direct zwave links to the controller.Just as @ljsquare said make OH the controller (yeah, a gateway in your terms) to send commands downstream through that OT GW to the OT controller.
You can even process their input first so you could have overlapping zones or your own calculations when to call for heat etc etc.
If you don’t want to use OH for that then what for ? You wouldn’t need it if your thermostats did directly talk to your boiler.
I stopt using heatapp! (on paper a good system, but in practice not for me ).
I’m now using Tado (www.tado.com/) as stand alone. there is a binding for Tado, but the last time I tried it with de v3 version of tado it was not working correctly on my sitemap.
But i’m happy with the system. It works with openterm and on/off systems.
