Smart Heating

In places, like where i live, where winters are cold and humid, heating your house is important. Doing it in a efficient way is even more important than before nowadays with all the climate stuff going on. Not to mention cost of gas, wood and wood pellets of course.

It doesn't matter how your heat your house, but it matters how yo make sure that you consume the right amount of whatever fuel you need (solar energy included) to get to the temperature you want. In order to do so, you need to monitor temperature in your house and have means to turn on or off the heating in each part of it according to the target temperature you want to reach.

My house have heating elements, if you have heated floors, the tools might be different, but the concept is the same.

Smart heating means being able to automatically turn on of off your heating on a room by room level. This can be achieved at design time by placing valves and thermostats in every room, but in my experience that is never done. If you, like me, don't have this luxury, you can achieve the same result using home automation and two simple items:

• Thermostatic valves for your heating elements
• Smart thermometers in every room

Thermostatic valves are valves that will open or close the flow of hot water in your heating elements according to a set temperature. Smart thermostatic valves are exactly the same kind of valves, but in addition they can be controlled remotely. This means not only set the temperature, but also open and close them remotely.

This is pretty interesting, because one of the issues with this kind of valves is having the controlling thermostat inside the valve, which is located, of course, very close to the heating elements. This creates issues with airflow and pockets of heat that will falsify the readings of the valve itself. The best approach would be to place the thermometer on the opposite side of the room, and this is there home automation comes into play.

These are nice little thingy, some with a fancy LCD display, that will read humidity and temperature. You will then be able to read it remotely.

Well, at this point it should be clear: install smart thermostatic valves and smart thermometers. Place the thermometers in a logical place, where it make sense to read the temperature, then setup an automation script in Home Assistant to open and close the thermostatic valve not accordingly to it's own preset, but according to the readings of your thermometer.

I will post here later on my Home Assistant scripts.