Multi zone heating solution

Hardware Home Automation
#1

Hi all,

I want to add multi zone heating solution to my house. I know evohome does the job. But are there any alternatives? There are zwave radiator thermostats but how does that force the central heater to switch on?
Any ideas how to fix that or other systems that will work?

Thanks Ramon

#2

There’s many alternatives, too many to list in fact.See the list of bindings, plus you can do the programming yourself using all sorts of sensors and actuators (hint: search the forum for ‘boilerplate’).
But this forum is not on HVAC and not to help you with Home Automation in a generic sense.
Please follow this before and when posting, and mind the ‘show efforts’ item.
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#3

Hi Ramon,

There are a number of questions that you need to answer first.

  • What’s your budget?

  • How much control do you want?

  • Do you want plug n play?

  • What home automation do you have at present?

I’ve been playing around with this for about a year now and still not where I want to be. But making progress. The route I took was to buy Z-Wave TRV’s for all 13 radiators and two Z-Wave wall thermostats and a Z-Wave boiler control unit. Using a number of rules within openHAB.

There are a number of issues relating to this and any solution for that matter. Some of mine are manageable, some I just have to live with. Most of the issues though are a compromise, function over battery life.

#4

Hi Gary,

At the moment i have a pi 3b running openhab with a zwave dongle. I connected a few switches and smoke sensors etc.
I can spend quite a bit of money on it if needed, though it does not necessarily need to be plug and play.
Would be good if i can set a schedule per zone, but also be able to overwrite it if needed, via a remote control device or local website.
Preferably it shpuld not be dependent on any cloud based services (i can reach my local intranet from outside).
From what i read evohome from honeywell seems to be good but it looks like the binding relies on the cloud service.

How do you make the boiler control unit switch on if a radiator needs heat?

Thank you Ramon

#5

Here’s my current solution. I’ve got 16 individual zones defined, each of which have their own target temperatures and schedules.

I still need to stop the overshooting of the target in some rooms, but it’s keeping my house a nice temperature, and every room is the right temperatures when it needs to be.

#6

I’ve recently bought into drayton wiser, which is working well so far. Went with wiser as it would work without the Internet (some don’t and heating stops working), very straight forward to setup (just swapped controller and TRVs), cheap, and gives us what we want. OH doesn’t fully support it yet, but I feel heating is something you should buy a ‘proper’ system for. If OH goes down for whatever reason e.g. Bad update/bug in a binding, you still want it to just work.

#7

I have a Secure SSR302 boiler control unit. This has two channel’s, one for the heating and the other for the hot water. Associated via ZWave I have two Secure SRT321’s, one in the Living Room (Master) and one on the first floor landing. So adjusting either thermostat by hand will switch the heating channel on the boiler control unit. This the basic setup and allows me to control my heating without the need of any OH rules. Each radiator has a Danfoss LC-13 installed to replace the mechanical TRV’s.

Presently I have grouped together a number of radiators and manage their setpoints via a number of rules within OH. So depending on the time of day and season I change the setpoint to an appropriate level. I would say that this is quite a basic setup but is a good starting point for myself. As all of the components are ZWave and battery operated I need to balance out battery life verses function, which means I have to compromise a little.

I hope that helps a little more @domofl

Regards,

Garry

#8

Thanks everybody for the advice and different ways to approach it.
I guess I will go for something that works independently from openhab (and my pi), but where I can influence the heating via openhab/pi.

I need to search a bit more which system exactly.

Thanks,

Ramon

#9

Hi Ramon,
Just to let you know I have evohome on my upstairs radiators integrated to OH2.
I use the scheduler built into evohome so dont actually do much in OH with them, just leave evohome up to that. It seems to work really nicely.
I have some zwave floor stats downstairs that control my underfloor heating using the rules in OH.