can anyone recommend a solution for controlling room temperature with an electrical heater with HomeKit support? Most systems I found have support for actuators for water radiators but not directly for simple electrical heaters.
Elgato eve has a nice room sensor and a smart plug, but you cannot control the set-point-temperature at the room sensor. I understand that’s also the case for Fibaro or KooGeek.
Is anyone aware of a nice thermo control unit with display and functionality for setting the set-point-temperature that works with a simple electrical switch to power an electrical heater on and off?
I know that electrical heaters are not very efficient, but it’s only for a small room where retrofitting a water heater is out of scope.
In theory this should be very simple, if the heater is “ON/OFF”. The complications you are facing is in finding off the shelf components to do it which allow a display and setting of set-point.
A SOnOff switch (one of the models with the temp probe built in) would do it perfectly, but you wouldn’t have (directly) a screen to set the set-point. However you could do that elsewhere from a phone. And send the new set point to the SOnOff with HTTP. It would require a small amount of C++ firmware, but that’s not as hard as it sounds these days.
This is why I do not play with “off the shelf”, it’s far, far too limiting and tends to make simple things harder.
However, one word of caution. Electric fires are quite high current and most simple relay smart switches are not rated for that current, so will get hot and potentially fail, in the worst case going on fire.
An electric fire can pull as much as 13 Amps while most smart switches are rated for 10 Amps or less.
This is particularly applicable to those heaters with glassed infrared elements. These have a high inrush current at switch on from cold. Assume at least double rated current.
