Hello you lot. Hopefully one of you might be able to throw me an idea here. I'm an ST refugee and I've been using Hubitat for some time now, I love the stability and I couldn't be happier with the move to HE!
So what am I after? Project time......
I'm fitting out a wooden holiday home. I'm in the UK and this place is a good 2 hour drive from where I am. I therefore want to reply HE. My biggest requirement relates to the heating.
I need to heat 3 bedrooms as well as turning on/off a couple of towel rails. The latter should be easy enough, it's the bedrooms I'm lost on.
I'd like to install wall mounted oil rads but I'm wondering how I could control them. I guess I have the following options:
Use something Smart that integrates
Use a dumb rad that I can manually set to something like 22C and use a room temperature to control the rad.
I have been using dumb radiators for a long time, each connected to a zwave plug and each room has a temperature sensor. I then use a virtual thermostat in HE to control them. This generally works well.
I know a lot of a people are against this method, but it has worked fine for me. What has happened though is that sometimes HE may hang, which then means it will not control the heaters. This could lead to issues in case it is winter.
On the other hand, it could go the other way, stuck in heating, but that is less of an issue if you set the internal radiator to a nice temp so it stops when it hits that temp.
Thanks @Kulfsson, pretty much what I was thinking. Relatively simple. Out of interest can I ask what sort of rads you are using as well as the temp sensor?
There are a range of UK available free standing / wall mounted oil rads with inbuilt Zigbee or ZWave. Sorry, being vague here as I read and forgot what brand but it was a credible manufacturer, maybe Dimplex. They are in various sizings and around £1K ea so not inexpensive.
Edit: There seem to be loads and at a third of that cost, plus WiFi too. Ignore my post.
My radiators are tego roundline, supposedly you can get a central heating unit for the latest version, but I pretty much just turn them on and off. I have done this on various home automation platforms for 8 years, and I have had 2 failures out of 8 radiators. Not sure if it is related to the way I control them, or just normal wear and tear.
For temp sensors I have whatever fits the bill. Battery operated zigbee, mains powered zwave and a Fibaro multi sensor.
and I've been using Hubitat for some time now, I love the stability and I couldn't be happier with the move to HE!
