Other The Home automation Thread

Ok well I was referring to external to the house temperature sensors rather than internal thermostats. which would allow for a smarter plan around heating to be created automatically. It might be excessive, I've never measured internal and external heat deltas of a building. If I was automating a house I'd do it though, just to see.

Maintenance, meal preparation and cleaning are the big time sucks in living in a home. If we could automate that lot, then we'd be moving from automation for convenience towards automation for increased productivity and time savings. You could hire someone to do all of that, but having a personal chef, maid and handyman follow you around the house seems like it would get expensive.

 

So do I

The 30-year old heatings we rip out already had outside temperature sensors and inside thermostats.
The internal one says when the heating has reached the desired temperature and the external one determins the selected "heating curve" or its shift...errrr
Google "heating curve for central heating"

 

Cool, I don't recall ever seeing them here. But maybe I'm just ignorant of them and have never noticed.

 

I've never seen them in the uk either. but I've only every lived in houses with gas boilers/ hot water radiators. I guess the outside temp could be useful if you have storage heaters or something similar where you need to set the temp well in advance of when you actually want heat.

But if this is what your after wouldn't tomorrows weather forecast from yahoo (or whatever weather app / site) actually be as / if not more useful.

 

I see where you are coming from, having future knowledge would allow you adjust the heating accordingly, but future predictions are probably not accurate enough. As Xir pointed out you use the outside temperature as parameter in setting the heat value of your heating system ( I wasn't aware of heating curves before Xir mentioned them) so doing it in real time seems to be fine.

On particularly cold days you might have found yourself bumping up the thermostat a few notches above where it normally sits. I've certainly had to do it in the past. An external temperature probe could allow for that adjustment to be made automatically.

Perhaps in Germany it gets so cold that having an external temperature probe is worth while. Winters are a bit milder closer to the Atlantic after all and so they may be unnecessary.

 

The problem I see with an external temperature sensor is that it's a single point, so if the sun shines on that side of your house it may read higher than it should, or if the wind blows on it it will read cooler than on a day that's just as cold but the winds blowing in the other direction. What if it's got a wet leaf stuck to it or it's covered in frost / rain /snow. All of these will lead to great variations in the reading even if the weather more generally is the same.

So I think that accurate temp at a single point is not what you need a more generalised temperature prediction from the internet would be cheaper / easier and generally more useful.

 

What you need is German style radiator valves and thermostats built in so they can regulate the temperature per room a bit better than the entire system being on.

Netamo have some good ones I'm not sure are on sale yet. No idea on protocol and what have you but certainly something to look at.

 

As I recall Screwfix have some for about £80

 

A Stevenson screen is usually used to protect instruments from direct light and rain. I would think wind that is cooling the sensor would also be cooling the house. If you want super accurate though you could also measure wind speed and calculate the air temperature. That's basically the setup that meteorologists feeding in to the likes of a weather website would use anyway.

A weather site may prove accurate enough though. I just think a proper set up measuring your weather in your location would be more accurate.

 

^This I don't understand either, at least on a personal level. In my house (a run of the mill 3 bedroom end of terrace) generally speaking the doors between all the rooms are usually left open so if I were to decide that I didn't need top bother heating an area (my daughters room for instance as she lives with her mum 50% of the time) then as theres plenty of airflow between rooms all I'm doing is moving the heating load from her radiator to the other radiators in the adjacent rooms. And even if I did close the door to minimise this aren't I just delaying the energy usage from today until the next time she's home (and given this is at most 3 or 4 days from now the saving for having the room cool for some of that time must be minimal).

If your house is large enough to have very separate zones (or whole floors or annexes) that have very different usage then this all goes out the window. But for most normal UK homes isn't this just overcomplicating the system for little or no benefit.

 

Doesn't look like anyone's updated this in quite sometime

 

I missed that, but even that doesn't fill me with confidence that they'll have a shippable product any time soon. That said if they do and they hit there £10-£15 target for a TRV I'd be interested in getting some but more because I think it's a cool idea then I actually think it'd save me money (I have TRV's on all my radiators and I couldn't tell you the last time I adjusted any of them)

 

A simple "dumb" TRV is about 10€ here, a good-branded one 15€ max.
An electronic timed one that recoginises "window open" (sudden cold) is between 10-25€
A networked one...30€ upwards.

Don wurry, ve haf a DIN regulation for allowed mounting pointz, no?

yeah, in the basic system, you have a (time controlled) thermostat to adjust the general living room temperature, and you can adjust the single rooms or radiators with TRV's and the outside sensor adjusts the flow-temperature.

This has been standart since the 80-90's

Nowadays, the systems are getting complicated

 

Makes sense to turn this into to a central repository for home automation related discussion at this point.

Anyone else been playing with a new Echo the last few weeks?

My Echo dot turned up last week when I was away, but been having using it since Sunday and I'm surprised on how useful it is.

Picks up Wemo devices with no faff whatsoever, and Hue devices simply by linking the Hue account. Doesn't pull in rooms set up in Hue for some reason, so need to group those separately, but fortunately you can still ask it to change lighting in certain rooms in natural language. I have a mate that reckoned he had to ask things like "Turn on Hue Lamp 1", but I can just say "turn on the lounge lights", "Set the balcony lights to 40", "dim the kitchen lights" etc.

I've picked up 4x hue GU10 spots for above the dining table on the basis that I no longer have to whip out a phone to control them. They're the full colour flavour so the temp can be changed - I'm guessing I'll have to set scenes for warm/cool light, thought will be impressed if it can just recognise something like "Romantic dinner lighting puh-lease".

I've found myself using it a fair bit for weather, sports, unit conversions - e.g. the stuff that would have me otherwise pulling out my phone to look up. Only a few seconds saved, but I'm finding it quite natural so far.

Not entirely chuffed that Harmony and IFTTT aren't yet available for UK accounts though - so many missed possibilities. Native Sonos integration would be nice too, but I'd take Harmony in the short term.

Anyone have any killer use cases for their echo?

EDIT: Yonomi looks good, like IFTTT on some much needed steroids. For all of the amazing things I thought IFTTT could do for me, all I have it doing now is turning on the lights on the balcony at sunset and off at 23:00

 

I'm going to see if i can get an echo or dot for evaluation at work. Our US office has had a couple yelling at each other for weeks now which is interesting.

For my own wallet, I'm going for a google home, as its voice command set ties into my android everything very nicely, and I organise my life through google calendar.

As to the radiator feedback,

I know that doors being open and what not will reduce the efficacy of a single roompoint, but its still an much better granular look at what energy is being pumped into your house to keep it at 22 degrees in the winter.

In other news I'm getting some lovely BLE energy harvesting temp/humidity sensors to evaluate

 

I got lazy with central heating a few years ago, and honestly haven't noticed any increase in my bills.

Used to be on a timer with typically-unoccupied rooms switched off. Now it runs on constant, all rooms on, all the time on the thermostats. The bottom level tends to be on most frequently, which seems to be pretty effective at heating the rest of the house through the central staircase that acts as a chimney.

Difference in bills - unnoticeable.

Granted it's a fairly new and well insulated house - had preposterous bills when attempting this on an older house that had a shoddy (barely insulated) extension.

 

Yeah its rough when you cant get it to balance nicely.

I would be up for experimenting with Radiator valves in my flat to see if I can get it to do what I want but alas London renting and whatnot. Maybe when I build my own house.

 

So I was given a hue (colour) starter kit, and while I sort out a lamp in the lounge to make use of the scenes I've got them dotted round the house.

The ability to change the temperature of the light is nice, I can't find a way to set the lights to change temperature and brightness during the day though. Ideally I'd like warm dull lights very early and very late and a nice daylight white during the afternoon and then a middle ground during the evening.

The Echo integration seems to be great, or terrible. I've had it work perfectly, deny all knowledge of a group which was working moments before and say "okay" while nothing happens.

I do like having the hue widget on my chromecast tablet (remote) though.

Perhaps a "Connected Home" sub forum in the Technology section?