It's a good point. The boiler can only be on or off, though one can at least turn the thermostat down so it's heating to 60º instead of 75º.
There is a lot of thermal mass in the UFH areas, relatively little in the areas with radiators. One of the zones of UFH is 80 square meters of floor, concrete screed with 840m of pipe containing 95 litres of water. The other UFH zones are smaller. The whole system was well designed and seems to be well balanced. But there is, of course, significant lag.
It's been used over the weekend, and the big area of UFH needed something like 6 hours of heating overnight on Friday and then... nothing for the rest of the weekend! It remained remarkably stable.
The rooms with radiators don't seem to do too much cycling either, to be fair. I think!
In essence I use Eurotronics Zigbee TRV controlled via Thermostat Scheduler ( time based) for the radiators. I was working fine until upgraded from Thermostat V1 to V2. For the time being I do not have any control over the boiler but even so I’ve got about 30% savings on the gas bill compared with before. Unfortunately there is not any driver in community to get more control over the Zigbee Eurotronic TRV’s apart of setting the temperature up and down.
For the underfloor heating I am using Salus self balancing actuators which I can switch them ON/OFF via Zigbee relays.
Still not being able to control the boiler for the time being. Nevertheless, I found at the end of last winter that I can reduce the temperature of the heating agent from 65 to about 42C with no noticeable effect on my comfort ( attention I am in Australia) . Hence, I do expect further savings from zoning and assisting the condensation boiler to be more efficient.
Just a few days ago I have linked the actuators with floor temperature sensors ( using plain Zigbee Smarthings leak sensors in absence of anything else around) via the vAdvanced Thermostat App. Then, I’ve included these virtual thermostats in Thermostat Scheduler V2 ( work in progress).
Besides that I set up the Eco mode ( -2C) to be ON/OFF based on outdoor temperature for the radiators and looking to do the same for floor heating plus working for some additional rules to improve further.
All the above, reduced the heat demand on the boiler, hence probable less cycling, despite the fact that I can not control the boiler yet
Now, I have approached the subcontractor which did the original basic automation to help me to connect the boiler switch calling for the heat and the pumps for UF heating and radiators heating to some Zigbee relays which I can control from Hubitat to get some control over the boiler as well.
thank you for your notes here - missed it at the time, and have just found it, so apologies for not replying in a timely fashion!
I've been caught up with other projects, so haven't been turning my attention to this for months. (Not so pressing, given that it's summer here.)
Soon, however, I'll need to revisit it, so this is helpful. We have actually changed all the TRVs to TP Link Kasa TRVs. These have been popular, because other people can operate them easily, either manually in an intuitive way by simply turning the knob, or via the Kasa app, which is also easy to use.
Will update here when progress is made or roadblocks are met!
That sounds like a superset of what I am trying to achieve I will order various components and set up a test installation here. I’m in the USA so I won’t be able to test the radiator itself. I’ll do that in a month in Germany. The underfloor heaters all seem to play nicely with controllers. Most of the devices which are Zigbee in Germany work with Tuya. However that seems to assume a one to many relationship between a central thermostat/controller and multiple heating units. Not what either of us are trying to achieve. Also I’d rather use Hubitat than Tuya.
