What's the best binding for heater thermostats?

Hi,

I want to install heater thermostats in my house. Which binding/hardware do you recommend?

Thanks for you suggestions!

Kind regards
Oliver

Thermostats are often specific to your region and heating equipment. For example, many thermostats made for the North American market won’t work in Europe and vice versa. What kind of heater do you have?

tado sounds interesting … especially if you are looking for a boiler/air conditioner thermostat.

Public API will be available in 2016

I live in Germany… it’s a M30 x 1,5 thread.

Check out the MAX! series.
Vendor eQ-3 is a relatively unknown German company, but they sell millions of their devices under various top home automation brands (Homematic, RWE Smart Home, …) and under the hood, they’re mostly the same product, so it’s proven technology.
The thermostats do have some minor issues (they’re sometimes noisy, and every now and then, you need to reset them), but overall, they work pretty well. And it’s the cheapest of all thermostat systems I know of.
Get a starter kit to include the cube gateway and use the maxcube OH binding.
Extra hint: look for mobilcom-debitel ‘SmartHome’ starter kits. They’re resold MAX! devices, too.

MAX! was intended to be a (radiator) heating system only, but now there’s also MAX! power plugs that you can attach your heater pump(s), electric heaters or floor heating valves to, as well as MAX! window sensors that automatically close thermostats when a window is opened.

Nice thing is, using the maxcube binding, you can also deploy these devices as cheap openHAB-controlled door/window sensors and power outlets.

Markus

Hi Markus,

thanks for your detailed answer. I stumbled upon Max!, too. I wonder if it’s better to use a Cube or a CUL stick. So you recommend the Cubeor the CUL stick and why?

Kind regards
Oliver

I use the cube because it provides a GUI. With the CUL stick, you have to manually configure and control everything yourself, for every device. Also, CUL doesn’t support window sensors yet. But it works - I have one, too.

Ok, the only drawback seems that you have to poll for status updates, right?

Yes, but you don’t have to poll if you leave time scheduling of
temperature control up to the cube.
(when I wrote a routine to poll, that seemed to somewhat confuse the
system, so I discontinued polling. You can still override cube control
from openHAB.)

Ok, I would like to use openHAB rules to control the temperature… Can you tell me something about your experiences concerning the range?

I use MAXCube binding with a few thermostats and window contact. My observations are:

  1. MAXCube three times lost the setup upon power failure, I had to reattach all devices using MAX! windows software.
  2. My OpenHAB setup controls thermostats, I found that when I change the temperature setting, the Cube binding is overflowed with messages and doesn’t respond to subsequent commans properly. The workaround was to divide logical GUI object from physical execution object. If you want I can share more details.
  3. You can logically connect window contact to thermostat to limit temperature while the window is open. I could not figure out how to time limit it with MAX! - my temp setting stays at 12 deg. until window is closed. So I am not using this anymore.
  4. I placed the window contacts in a way that I can crank my windows a bit without activating “window open” message.
  5. Thermostats are in AUTOMATIC mode, the shedule was set in Cube using MAX! windows software. I can still adjust the temperature using OH rules. Overflow of commands is still an issue, so I wrote a code in rule to delay command sending to the the binding.

So, would you recommend to use the CUL binding instead?

I have no experiece with cul, as I do not have the dongle.

Overall I am satisfied with Cube, after tweaking a bit it suits my needs.

ok, thanks

I’m trying to use the CUL binding at the moment. For me, at least, it looks like it’d do what I need - I have written rules that create multiple zones and allow me to set 4 different timed temperatures for each zone during the day, and automatically turn the heating pump on and off.

However, my big stumbling block is that I cannot get the CUL binding to load at all. It seems that I must be making some sort of newbie mistake, but I cannot work out what that is. I’m beginning to suspect that the CUL binding may not work with later OpenHAB versions. That would clearly be a factor in deciding whether to use it or not - I’d suggest trying to at least get it to load on your install before buying the devices.

Refer Maxcul doesn't start for me with 1.7.1