I am in the middle of replacing my old oil boiler moving to a NG on demand unit. I’m using an Ecobee thermostat with the satellite temp sensors. I had to split my main floor zone into 2 separate zones to start balancing the temperature with a Motorized Smart Valve Actuator that I programed with Home Assistant to open and close a ball valve. It did help but some rooms are still cooler than i would like for the kids. Since i am going to have to re-pipe most of the back room and i can get to all the radiators from the drop ceiling i would like to separate all the rooms into their own zones. But i don’t want to have to buy a thermostat for every room.
I would like to get the correct Motorized Zone Valve 24 VAC for a total of 7 zones to control the valves and 2 more contacts to control the 2 pumps as if there was a thermostat for each room that called for heat to have the pump turn on. I would like to power this controller with 120VAC (US house voltage). And to be wifi and not need some sort of hub as every smart device in my house is only wifi on its own network. If this was a Tuya or Smartlife compatible device that would work but i definitely need it to be able to be connected to Home Assistance directly would be best but cloud would work too. I know the valves i need, i am just not sure about the controller. I know Jake from jakkuh formally of Linus Tech Tips had talked about something like this when Linus bought his new house but he already had thermostats in all his rooms and decided not to do this. I do not have thermostats in each room and really don’t want the kids to have that kind of control.
Any help i can get to point me in the correct direction would be awesome and always looking to learn something new.
Would likely be way easier to throw cheap programmable thermostats with a “lock” function in each room. Especially since you’re already repiping and everything is fairly open it sounds like. Will keep the kids from messing with it and will keep homeassistant from adding more stuff to fail. It would also save the sanity of the hvac tech who does the first “no heat” call (unless you are also taking care of that, in which case its a mute point)
Edited to add. There are also zone control boards with sensors instead of tstats for each room that could work as well. Honeywell is a decent brand that may have some solutions. Been a bit since I designed any HVAC control systems though so there may be new/better players in the game now.
They work with ESPHome and HA without issues. Wire the relays in to turn the valves off and on. I use them for lights, electric water valves, or anything else.
For a temp sensor, I have a bunch of Aqara Zigbee Temperature and Humidity Sensors setup around the house.
Use HA to read the temp sensor and turn the valve off and on. I think there is an automation in HA that will combine the two into a climate control panel.
these relay-driven io-cards are pretty nice. if you want more connectivity check for raspberry-pi hat and raspberry pi zero. this solution is more expensive than the very good tip from @Porch but you can run a full independent linux on them. with it you can create internet-connectivity with access from your smartphone etc.. it’s more expensive but way more flexible when it comes to automate your home. also check for tags like grafana and home assistant. there are a lot of ideas already fitting your needs and that you can adopt.
I used to use Rhaspberry-pi with relay boards, but then that a whole OS to manage and it was overkill for O/I. All I really need is to get remote O/I into HA and ESPHome does a great job of that.
I have standardized on the KC868-A8 around the home and property. I think I have 12 or so running.
This one is in a box on a hill that has some wifi gear and a CCTV camera. The KC box measures temp, battery voltage, and lets me hard power cycle things if stuff is not responding.
KinCony has some example yaml files files for ESPHome on their website. Note that it does support BS18S20 temp sensors, but the 1-wire bus does not like distances more then a few feet, so don’t plan to use it for remote room temp sensors.
Running the new Pex piping in the drop ceiling in the basement is way easier than trying to find the wall in the floor above because this old house has 6 layers of flooring. So running the wires in the wall would mean running every wire up to the attic then back down to the basement. Using HA i already created a program that checks the temperature of one room temp sensor verse another and opens or closes the valve.
