Looking for recommendations for smart heating systems

[andrewducker]

With extension work on the house nearly done, I'll need to fit smart valves to all of the new radiators and suchlike. And as that's going to be an expense and some work, I thought it was worth having a look at what the alternatives were.

So I had a look about, and then felt disappointed, and thought I should write down what my requirements are, and match things against them, to explain why all of the options are disappointing. And see if anyone could recommend a system which was better than I was finding.

I've split it into hard and soft requirements - as some of them are things I can live without, they're just nice to have.

Hard requirements
Temperature control - Obviously, I want to control my radiators individually. Because there's no point heating the bedrooms during the day, or the living room and kitchen overnight.
Controls the boiler - There's no point the radiator valve turning off and on if the boiler itself isn't on. So the radiator valves need to talk to the boiler controller and turn it on when necessary.
Physical door and window sensors - I live with a variety of people, and they tend to open windows to let in some fresh air. There are many valves which claim to be able to spot a window opening by temperaurte drop - the reviews for all of them are terrible. So physical window sensors are a must.

Soft requirements
Anticpatory heating - I want to be able to say to the value "Heat the living room up for 17:30" and have it work out when to turn on in order to make that happen. I don't currently have that, but it would be nice.
Separate heat sensors - Having the thermometer be built into the valve means that you risk having the radiator heat up a small patch of the room by the radiator. It would be nice if the sensor could be somewhere else in the room.


Systems
Hive - this is our current system. It talks to the boiler. It has physical sensors that allow me to turn off the radiator when windows open. In a kludgy kind of way (I can set actions for the doors and windows opening, and change the radiator to on/off. But that doesn't work for multiple windows in a room. Doesn't have separate sensors or anticipatory heating.
Eve home heating - Looks lovely. Currently Apple only, but will be based on Matter (the new spiffy home standard) at some point soon. However, won't turn my boiler off and on, so no use.
Honeywell Evohome - No window-sensor integration. Despite them selling those for their security systems. You can get a physical attachment that allows you to run a cable to your window. Which I am totally not doing.
Tado - No physical window sensors
Netatmo - Window sensors can't be hooked up to the smart radiators.

So, Hive (which is what we already have) is the best of them.  But it's still not ideal.  Anyone recommend anything better?

Comments

[mountainkiss]

If Josh had given a tenth of the attention to our marriage that he gave to setting up and managing the smart heating system, we would still be together.

[andrewducker]

*hug*

[mountainkiss]

On balance we’re better as friends and I did my fair share of wrongs, but this one still galls me.

[andrewducker]

It's not good to leave your partner feeling ignored. I'm sorry he did that.

Or was it more that you felt he wasn't invested in making things work?

[mountainkiss]

He just never cared about me as much as he cared about Netatmo. To be fair I’m not sure he has ever cared about anything else as much as Netatmo either. If you taxed him with this, he would laugh and agree.

[mountainkiss]

Put differently, his actions were entirely in accordance with his priorities and as such entirely rational.

[silveradept]

Question from the gallery. What systems are already in place, and what platforms, if any, do they use?

Next question, depending on the answer, might be: Do you have a spare machine lying around that could be pressed into service as a coordinator between all of those components, assuming the coordinator can read data from and issue commands to all of those components?

[channelpenguin]

I'm sure there's a whole bunch of people out there doing it with a Pi/Arduino etc.

Industrial heating control systems are also very sophisticated - but totally out of budget (and from what my professional friend Paul tells me, full of footguns if you lack the appropriate mechanical background). You might get some ideas there.

If I recall, you lose about 1C of heat and a lot of moisture in a standard 10-15 minutes "Durchlüftung" (Germans are very keen on fresh air and will typically do this every few hours). I'd wonder if that's even worth trying to optimise round. It seems like "throwing heat out" but it takes moisture with it, that's also important as damp air feels colder.

And do look into the actual economics of just leaving things on really low all the time and turning them up when you need. It took forever to convince me, but for my big draughty house, it's definitely the way to go. If I let it cool overnight (say) it can take all day to gain 2C, and in cloudy subzero windy weather, may fail to even do that. And I should not want to turn it off because the window is open because then the drop much be 2-3C which will take a LONG time to build back. Our ex-warehouse riverside office in Bremen has the same issue. My oil boiler head unit is an industrial unit and actually very sophisticated (for 30yr old kit) with atmosphere sensors and lots of trickery... But I have never programmed it - nor did Paul in the 2 years he was here! I find it quicker to dress pretty warmly and stick jumpers on and off, plus have a furry heated blanket that lies on my big sofabed in the living room, which takes care of me and the cat if it's chilly. And a heated mat at my standing desk.

Of course that isn't your house and isn't your spec, you want automation. I hope whatever you end up with is not more hassle than it's worth.

[andrewducker]

It's all Hive at the moment

[andrewducker]

My place isn't at all drafty (I fixed the few small drafts). So it warms up pretty quickly.

[silveradept]

Okay. All Hive is fine.

It may be absolute overkill for what you would like, but perhaps an install of Home Assistant could help you make some more complex logic and automation to help you achieve the goals you want. They have a Hive integration so they should be able to do some controls and sensor readouts and you can design the logic you want to accompany it.

Or, of there's some other sensor package that will complement it well, and Home Assistant understands that, HA can act as a coordinator between them, using the sensor data to control the Hive actions.

If you have the spare machine to dedicate to it, it might be suited to your needs.

[andrewducker]

I am tempted to add HA to the mix. So long as I'm not dependent on it, as I don't want to end up with a system that breaks because I ran an update.

[silveradept]

Once you have an HA stable and working, there's a fairly long lead time for developers to deal with any breaking changes, or if a service is shutting down, and the developers are pretty good about detailing what happens between version updates. So you can make your decisions about which versions you want to jump between and when.

It is possible that things will break between updates, definitely, because they do multiple releases in a month. But they're pretty generous about where the "earliest supported version" line is, as best as I can tell.

[andrewducker]

Yeah, if I can get it stable. Needs to be something that Jane can also use.

[silveradept]

It may take a fair amount of work up front, but the dashboards are fully customizable, and there is an Android app that can make phones and tablets able to access the dashboards and create widgets on an Android home screen. It also can work with voice assistants for those kinds of controls as well, based on what ones you want to have hooked into HA. It defaults to only being controlled over the local network, but there are ways of making it controllable from outside the network.

[channelpenguin]

Excellent. Then when you get controlling the radiators sorted, turning up and down should work well.

It seems you live with people who remember to air the place, which is vital to control humidity (and the evils that too much brings!). :-).

[channelpenguin]

Maybe keep a bunch of manual heads for the rads as the emergency backup?

[andrewducker]

I'll see what I can manage in the five minutes I get free from the children each month!

[andrewducker]

Oh, Hive will undoubtedly continue to work (it's been very reliable for the last 4 years). It's only running my own custom software I'm nervous of. So hopefully I'll be able to revert back if necessary. If I ever get the chance to play with things!

[danieldwilliam]

But it is sad. I'm sad about it.

[danieldwilliam]

I am curious about this as I think I'm about to replace all the heating in my flat.

[mountainkiss]

I was sad (and enraged!) at the time and I am occasionally still sad, but he is who he is! And we have always been able to be very truthful about it and laugh about it. He is a very good friend to me and I hugely value his presence in my life.

[andrewducker]

I'll add "Automated heating" to the agenda for lunchtime!

[andrewducker]

I'm glad that you still have that.

[fub]

I don't have concrete advice, but I'll tell you about our setup. Because we have not automated the heating -- our house has enough isolation that we can get it warm quick enough, and we control the temperature of the central heating manually.

But what we have automated is air quality. We have a glass hatch in our living room roof, and with a remote (and an app) we can open and close it. It has a rain sensor so it closes automatically when it starts to rain, which is also nice. But we also have a sensor in our living room that measures temperature, humidity and CO2 levels. If any of those values go outside of the bounds configured, and it is not too cold outside, the system will open the hatch automatically to air out the room. This does wonders for the air quality and (thus) our wellbeing.

If you're going to set up an automated system, my advice would be to not forget air quality, because it makes a massive difference if the CO2 is 1200 ppm or 450 ppm inside!

[andrewducker]

Thank you, that's definitely something to bear in mind!

[channelpenguin]

Yes yes yes! Love this.

My house is old and draughty and doesn't much need it. But it is so important.

(Germans know all about this, of course and open windows regularly in most enclosed environments. One of the things I love about here)

[bens_dad]

Because there's no point heating the bedrooms during the day, or the living room and kitchen overnight.

How long are you sticking with a boiler ? Heat pumps run at lower temperatures so this may not be true if you were to switch.

AIUI since the internal walls are often not well insulated you can end up with one radiator trying to heat both rooms. Heat pumps are most efficient when running gently, so it can be better to leave the radiator on in the unused room.

[andrewducker]

We will definitely have a rethink when we eventually switch to a heat pump. I'd love to have underfloor heating, but that would be even more expense, and probably mean moving out while it was done, which I just can't face right now.

[hairyears]

I guess the next question is security: not just against malicious actors, but also the certainty that your product will go out-of-support one day - probably when the manufacturer goes out of business.

This isn't just about updates: is your controller dependent on the continuing existence of a web service?

[andrewducker]

Alas, pretty much all of them that are at all advanced do some of that.

But I think it works from home if the internet is down, so hopefully that will continue.