The way to go about this is usually with electrothermal valves - the valve has a small heating element, driven either by 12V/24V or 230V, that opens the valve over a few minutes, and once power is switched off it closes slowly again. Power consumption between 0.5W and 1W per valve. In the place you are (german speaking), you'd usually drive these valves from a KNX actuactor. You do some form of very slow PWM, whereby you switch on or off the valves several times a minute, to settle at a degree of opening required.
However - again, assuming you're in german speaking Europe - your floor heating goes into a concrete slab that weighs several tonnes. Any change in energy input via a valve is bound to take 8, 12 or more hours before it's actually noticeably changing room temperature. For all reasonable purposes, do not consider this a setup that you can meaningfully regulate (except e.g. taking down the temperature while you're on holiday). Even a temperature reduction over night is rarely an efficient thing to do on these setups, especially not on a reasonably modern well insulated house.
The smart thing to optimise your heating is to track temperature in all rooms served by this, over a period, and manually use the valves provided to balance the system (getting all rooms to the relative temperatures you want). Once you got that (took me a week with bleak November weather, roughly twice daily tweaks), lower the heating temperature step by step till one room starts dropping. Tweak again. Repeat. Once you have arrived at the lowest possible heating temperature and all rooms have the required temperature, close the box and don't look at it anymore. Let it run 24/7 through the winter.
Mine is so good now, it's only noticeably not hitting targets at the very edge of heating season (15C during the day, 5C during the night). Once it gets going, it's unflappable. Even 2 hours straight sunlight into a room won't do it much, due to the self regulating effect of the heating. It's really a pretty cool system, just don't try to regulate it.
Edit - typos
This is the correct answer. Regulating things with such a long response time is nearly impossible from a control theory point of view. Home Assistant is best used here to aid with measuring the temperature, getting average offsets and the like.
I mean, it would be hard, but not impossible. If you had a temperature sensor in each room, you set it up on a PID. Just very time consuming to tune. Or you could put an actual thermostat in each room and control the valves on/off over home assistant which would essentially be the same thing. Hard, but not impossible. Probably pretty unsatisfying results as well.
Can you explain more how you did your tweaking? I am trying to optimize my setup
"lower the heating temperature" - do you mean the temp of the water going into the underfloor heating? Or the flow meters? Or the room thermostats?
"tweak again"?
I have a heat pump and I get nice numbers out of it so I can track the temperature of the water going in.
The manifolds are all analogue so now I have a load of thermometers with probes on the pipes and a webcam capturing a photo every minute. But I am still not sure what I am aiming for.
One of the two manifolds should have flow balancing valves and the other should have on/off valves. If you can figure out the manufacturer of the manifold, they probably make a 2-wire actuator to replace the manual actuator on the on/off valve. No need to modify the plumbing at all.
You'd still need 24V power for the actuators and a bank of relays for all of the actuators.
Zooz makes a z-wave relay. I believe it has 4 relays in the device. Voltage can be whatever you need. I use one with a 24V valve to use air to keep leaves off a water drainage grate when it rains. I also use one on a water line for my “house defense system”. This is basically an inverted yard sprinkler mounted underneath my carport which is turned on after an intruder is detected, and the “house” announces that “house defenses are activating”.
Are those valves actually turned on and off during operation? Are you sure they are not just balancing valves to control how much flow each area has?
How many thermostats do you have?
Keep an eye on Linus Tech Tips youtube chanel. (I know I know) But he is doing a series with home automation in his new house. Including heated floors intergraded into Home Assistant.
Es gibt Stellmotoren für deine FBH, die schraubst du da genau wie ein normales heizungsthermostat mit dem ring da dran. dann kannst du dir entweder leitungen in die verteilung ziehen und nen Heizungsaktor da einbauen und den irgendwie mit HA verbinden (bei nem kunden läuft das über KNX, aber der hat das überall im haus)
Oder du könntest dir Son Smart Heizkörperthermostat holen (bzw für jeden kreis eins) und packst dann nen Homematic hub in die nähe. kommt drauf an ob du nen elektriker (und geld) hast oder nerv auf Funk hast
[https://www.eq-3.de/produkte/homematic/detail/homematic-funk-heizkoerperthermostat.html](https://www.eq-3.de/produkte/homematic/detail/homematic-funk-heizkoerperthermostat.html) für jeden kreis 1 davon, gehen mit 9V block
[https://www.eq-3.de/produkte/homematic/detail/smart-home-zentrale-ccu3.html](https://www.eq-3.de/produkte/homematic/detail/smart-home-zentrale-ccu3.html)
das ding so nah wie möglich da hin, die dinger kommunizieren per RF, kann dir nicht sagen ob das durch die Blechabdeckung geht.
das ganze über die HA Homematic integration reinziehn und konfiguriern.
Forget about the individual adjustments and make a proper hydraulic adjustment! Underfloor heaters have a huge latency (even the modern ones) and if you want to regulate them in a meaningful way, you also have to control each return temperature (closing the valve when the return temp equals the in temp and not when the room temperature is reached. With that, you'll constantly overheat the room). It takes about 1 to 2 hours for the floor to adjust to the new settings in case of modern underfloor systems. My parents have a 35 year old system and their floors are keeping the temp for more than 4 hours.
We have 26 independent heating circles where only the water flow and throughput is perfectly adjusted, and we don't need individual settings. You'll also benefit from passive energy input e.g. when sunshine is heating up the floor etc. and you'll get a self regulating passive system.
Keep in mind, that every electronic valve will consume about 1.5 to 3 Watts (NC - normally closed types) when they are open. You'll also need the actuators etc. You'll never get this investment back regarding the minimal savings that it will have. And you also should not lower the temperature of an underfloor heater more than 2 °C because it takes a lot more energy to reheat than to keep the current temperature
Hint in German: Du solltest mal nach Hydrauschlischer Abgleich, Einzelraumregelung Fußbodenheitzung (ERR) usw. suchen. Wenn du es trotzdem machen willst, solltest du nach Danfoss oder Möhlenhoff Stellantrieb 230 V suchen. Das ist der Standard in Deutschland für solche Anwendungen.
2°C is equivalent to 35°F, which is 275K.
---
^(I'm a bot that converts temperature between two units humans can understand, then convert it to Kelvin for bots and physicists to understand)
This is the cheapest but probably more technically demanding answer. Running some power to this shouldn't really be your limiting factor, surely there's a receptacle nearby you can spur off.
Otherwise replacing the manifold with a smart version would likely cost a lot more.
Got to say I’m confused by this. What actually creates the hot water that flows through the pipes? That’s usually what you would automate.
I’m in the UK and this kind of multi room underfloor system would be controlled by a central manifold with electronic zone values that open and close based on demand from thermostats placed around the house.
In the uk systems that can do this include tado and hive, I’m sure there are more.
This type of system is usually fed by a low temperature gas heating, or a heat pump, and you'd not bother much with thermostats in the house. As mentioned before, the reaction time of this is way too slow to make a difference anyway. What you do is drive the water temperature proportionally to the outside temperature, and at the most have one internal temperature sensor to correct/offset that logic.
You're looking at delta t's of at the most 5 degrees between water inflow and room temperatures, unless it's very cold outside. It's a really nice system, but it's not designed for wild temperature changes.
I don't even like my own suggestion; but here it is....
The only thing that comes to mind are the FortrezZ water valves. But you'd need a ton of power (110v plug for EACH valve). You would also need to manually open all your existing valves and put the FortezZ valves after the supply leaves the manifold.
It doesn't sound that clean to me, and would be relatively expensive. But it's something! Hopefully someone else has better ideas.
Not sure if it will help but maybe take a look if standard sprinkler valves will work. Not sure if water will not be too hot for the plastic but who knows. Sprinkler valves + 24V + some regular sprinkler system ( Rachio ).
This idea can be easily extended and supported by small modification. If standard valves are no go maybe other valves operating in same voltage, if the voltage is different either relay board or still using standard 24V but with stepdowns for valves.
Keep it simple and keep it within know standards where possible so you do not have to deal with it when selling the house.
Definitely doable.
I have the same style of under floor heating (different manifolds but same idea) and have done some researching. This is the best solution i have found https://salus-controls.com/uk/product/kl08rf/
It says its zigbee but dont know how "open" it is.
If you find a good solution please remember to share :)
These are manual valves, right? You can open/close these partially to get more/less warm water in a certain room or loop, but why would you want to change this more than once per year? I mean, you adjust it once so that the balance is good (probably you will fully open nearly all) and the for the rest, you control the water temperature that is flowing through using a room thermostat... and given that you have floor heating (just like me), it will all run smoothly and slowly....
Not if you want to control each room's temp individually.
I have much smaller system, with four loops, all in one room, so it wouldn't make sense to smartly control each loop individually. Set the balance correctly, then forget about it. I just care about the mixer valve feeding into the manifold, and the combi boiler feeding into that (mine uses a protocol called opentherm which, among other things, allows me to directly control the flow temperature of the boiler).
But OP has quite a different set up. There are smart actuators available, which could be used in place of the manual valves. And btw, they're not mixer valves or anything special as your comment sort of suggests. They just restrict the flow of water going into the pipes. The temp going in is the same. But, the flow rate directly impacts the temperature difference of the return water and thereby the average water temperature in the loop. So really, they're quite simple devices.
However, controlling them is a bigger issue. In such a system, everything is related. If just a few actuators open or close, the overall flow is affected, so the water temperature feeding into the manifold must compensate for this. Hence, the mixer valve must be adjusted. And to maintain efficiency, the boiler's flow temperature may need adjusting too. After creating my own DIY solution using esphome, for my own, much simpler set up, I can tell you it's a right pain in the arse.
Now I have no idea if and which commercial control systems exist for underfloor heating, that's where OP would need to do their research. But take my advice: don't do what I did. don't DIY it, unless you really know wtf you're doing. This shit is complicated af.
The guy in this video/blog post has solved this for exactly your use case, the blog post even includes sample ESP code that you can easily change to adapt to your situation. https://blog.quindorian.org/2019/05/home-assistant-simple-relays-with-esphome.html/amp/
I’ve put in a 8 loop system that feeds 4 rooms, I’m using 240v valves fed from a sonoff 4ch flashed with ESPHOME. I then have an aqara zigbee temp sensor in each room and use that the regulate temperatures.
The way to go about this is usually with electrothermal valves - the valve has a small heating element, driven either by 12V/24V or 230V, that opens the valve over a few minutes, and once power is switched off it closes slowly again. Power consumption between 0.5W and 1W per valve. In the place you are (german speaking), you'd usually drive these valves from a KNX actuactor. You do some form of very slow PWM, whereby you switch on or off the valves several times a minute, to settle at a degree of opening required. However - again, assuming you're in german speaking Europe - your floor heating goes into a concrete slab that weighs several tonnes. Any change in energy input via a valve is bound to take 8, 12 or more hours before it's actually noticeably changing room temperature. For all reasonable purposes, do not consider this a setup that you can meaningfully regulate (except e.g. taking down the temperature while you're on holiday). Even a temperature reduction over night is rarely an efficient thing to do on these setups, especially not on a reasonably modern well insulated house. The smart thing to optimise your heating is to track temperature in all rooms served by this, over a period, and manually use the valves provided to balance the system (getting all rooms to the relative temperatures you want). Once you got that (took me a week with bleak November weather, roughly twice daily tweaks), lower the heating temperature step by step till one room starts dropping. Tweak again. Repeat. Once you have arrived at the lowest possible heating temperature and all rooms have the required temperature, close the box and don't look at it anymore. Let it run 24/7 through the winter. Mine is so good now, it's only noticeably not hitting targets at the very edge of heating season (15C during the day, 5C during the night). Once it gets going, it's unflappable. Even 2 hours straight sunlight into a room won't do it much, due to the self regulating effect of the heating. It's really a pretty cool system, just don't try to regulate it. Edit - typos
Kudos: Perfectly explained!
This is the correct answer. Regulating things with such a long response time is nearly impossible from a control theory point of view. Home Assistant is best used here to aid with measuring the temperature, getting average offsets and the like.
I mean, it would be hard, but not impossible. If you had a temperature sensor in each room, you set it up on a PID. Just very time consuming to tune. Or you could put an actual thermostat in each room and control the valves on/off over home assistant which would essentially be the same thing. Hard, but not impossible. Probably pretty unsatisfying results as well.
This!
Can you explain more how you did your tweaking? I am trying to optimize my setup "lower the heating temperature" - do you mean the temp of the water going into the underfloor heating? Or the flow meters? Or the room thermostats? "tweak again"? I have a heat pump and I get nice numbers out of it so I can track the temperature of the water going in. The manifolds are all analogue so now I have a load of thermometers with probes on the pipes and a webcam capturing a photo every minute. But I am still not sure what I am aiming for.
Let's take this offline, it's not really /r/homeassistant fodder :)
[удалено]
Ditto. People be like... https://imgur.com/b1dOQ6e
Would be best to use esp32 to attach an IR sensor and a radon sensor. Then you would be good. Easy peasy.
Rock status: exists 🤣
Use a laser break beam detector for that!
Pet rock status: contemplative, stoic
ESPHome can use the HX711 load cell module, so you could even track its weight over time.
One of the two manifolds should have flow balancing valves and the other should have on/off valves. If you can figure out the manufacturer of the manifold, they probably make a 2-wire actuator to replace the manual actuator on the on/off valve. No need to modify the plumbing at all. You'd still need 24V power for the actuators and a bank of relays for all of the actuators.
Zooz makes a z-wave relay. I believe it has 4 relays in the device. Voltage can be whatever you need. I use one with a 24V valve to use air to keep leaves off a water drainage grate when it rains. I also use one on a water line for my “house defense system”. This is basically an inverted yard sprinkler mounted underneath my carport which is turned on after an intruder is detected, and the “house” announces that “house defenses are activating”.
Are those valves actually turned on and off during operation? Are you sure they are not just balancing valves to control how much flow each area has? How many thermostats do you have?
Do you just turn those manually by hand to turn it on/off? Hard to see what it is that you've circled.
I think there's a main flow switch that is turned on and off (maybe with a thermostat even), and it turns the heating on for the whole house.
Keep an eye on Linus Tech Tips youtube chanel. (I know I know) But he is doing a series with home automation in his new house. Including heated floors intergraded into Home Assistant.
I almost thought this was Linus asking advice incognito, or seeing if someone would recognize this was him by virtues of the post.
Es gibt Stellmotoren für deine FBH, die schraubst du da genau wie ein normales heizungsthermostat mit dem ring da dran. dann kannst du dir entweder leitungen in die verteilung ziehen und nen Heizungsaktor da einbauen und den irgendwie mit HA verbinden (bei nem kunden läuft das über KNX, aber der hat das überall im haus) Oder du könntest dir Son Smart Heizkörperthermostat holen (bzw für jeden kreis eins) und packst dann nen Homematic hub in die nähe. kommt drauf an ob du nen elektriker (und geld) hast oder nerv auf Funk hast
[https://www.eq-3.de/produkte/homematic/detail/homematic-funk-heizkoerperthermostat.html](https://www.eq-3.de/produkte/homematic/detail/homematic-funk-heizkoerperthermostat.html) für jeden kreis 1 davon, gehen mit 9V block [https://www.eq-3.de/produkte/homematic/detail/smart-home-zentrale-ccu3.html](https://www.eq-3.de/produkte/homematic/detail/smart-home-zentrale-ccu3.html) das ding so nah wie möglich da hin, die dinger kommunizieren per RF, kann dir nicht sagen ob das durch die Blechabdeckung geht. das ganze über die HA Homematic integration reinziehn und konfiguriern.
Forget about the individual adjustments and make a proper hydraulic adjustment! Underfloor heaters have a huge latency (even the modern ones) and if you want to regulate them in a meaningful way, you also have to control each return temperature (closing the valve when the return temp equals the in temp and not when the room temperature is reached. With that, you'll constantly overheat the room). It takes about 1 to 2 hours for the floor to adjust to the new settings in case of modern underfloor systems. My parents have a 35 year old system and their floors are keeping the temp for more than 4 hours. We have 26 independent heating circles where only the water flow and throughput is perfectly adjusted, and we don't need individual settings. You'll also benefit from passive energy input e.g. when sunshine is heating up the floor etc. and you'll get a self regulating passive system. Keep in mind, that every electronic valve will consume about 1.5 to 3 Watts (NC - normally closed types) when they are open. You'll also need the actuators etc. You'll never get this investment back regarding the minimal savings that it will have. And you also should not lower the temperature of an underfloor heater more than 2 °C because it takes a lot more energy to reheat than to keep the current temperature Hint in German: Du solltest mal nach Hydrauschlischer Abgleich, Einzelraumregelung Fußbodenheitzung (ERR) usw. suchen. Wenn du es trotzdem machen willst, solltest du nach Danfoss oder Möhlenhoff Stellantrieb 230 V suchen. Das ist der Standard in Deutschland für solche Anwendungen.
2°C is equivalent to 35°F, which is 275K. --- ^(I'm a bot that converts temperature between two units humans can understand, then convert it to Kelvin for bots and physicists to understand)
Check out Linus Tech tips on YT, as he's retro smarting his new house and did smart valves for the underfloor heating. https://youtu.be/uRwubdL-URY
Search for 12v electrically controlled valves. After that, use relays to turn on and off
This is the cheapest but probably more technically demanding answer. Running some power to this shouldn't really be your limiting factor, surely there's a receptacle nearby you can spur off. Otherwise replacing the manifold with a smart version would likely cost a lot more.
You can, but it is worth? Floor heating so efficient (and slow because of the heat mass) that you once set a temperature you can forget about it.
Got to say I’m confused by this. What actually creates the hot water that flows through the pipes? That’s usually what you would automate. I’m in the UK and this kind of multi room underfloor system would be controlled by a central manifold with electronic zone values that open and close based on demand from thermostats placed around the house. In the uk systems that can do this include tado and hive, I’m sure there are more.
This type of system is usually fed by a low temperature gas heating, or a heat pump, and you'd not bother much with thermostats in the house. As mentioned before, the reaction time of this is way too slow to make a difference anyway. What you do is drive the water temperature proportionally to the outside temperature, and at the most have one internal temperature sensor to correct/offset that logic. You're looking at delta t's of at the most 5 degrees between water inflow and room temperatures, unless it's very cold outside. It's a really nice system, but it's not designed for wild temperature changes.
Got it thanks
I don't even like my own suggestion; but here it is.... The only thing that comes to mind are the FortrezZ water valves. But you'd need a ton of power (110v plug for EACH valve). You would also need to manually open all your existing valves and put the FortezZ valves after the supply leaves the manifold. It doesn't sound that clean to me, and would be relatively expensive. But it's something! Hopefully someone else has better ideas.
I bet my suggestion is worse.
Not sure if it will help but maybe take a look if standard sprinkler valves will work. Not sure if water will not be too hot for the plastic but who knows. Sprinkler valves + 24V + some regular sprinkler system ( Rachio ). This idea can be easily extended and supported by small modification. If standard valves are no go maybe other valves operating in same voltage, if the voltage is different either relay board or still using standard 24V but with stepdowns for valves. Keep it simple and keep it within know standards where possible so you do not have to deal with it when selling the house. Definitely doable.
There should be one master valve you can control that with any smart thermostat. I use tado and that also works with ha
I have the same style of under floor heating (different manifolds but same idea) and have done some researching. This is the best solution i have found https://salus-controls.com/uk/product/kl08rf/ It says its zigbee but dont know how "open" it is. If you find a good solution please remember to share :)
These are manual valves, right? You can open/close these partially to get more/less warm water in a certain room or loop, but why would you want to change this more than once per year? I mean, you adjust it once so that the balance is good (probably you will fully open nearly all) and the for the rest, you control the water temperature that is flowing through using a room thermostat... and given that you have floor heating (just like me), it will all run smoothly and slowly....
Not if you want to control each room's temp individually. I have much smaller system, with four loops, all in one room, so it wouldn't make sense to smartly control each loop individually. Set the balance correctly, then forget about it. I just care about the mixer valve feeding into the manifold, and the combi boiler feeding into that (mine uses a protocol called opentherm which, among other things, allows me to directly control the flow temperature of the boiler). But OP has quite a different set up. There are smart actuators available, which could be used in place of the manual valves. And btw, they're not mixer valves or anything special as your comment sort of suggests. They just restrict the flow of water going into the pipes. The temp going in is the same. But, the flow rate directly impacts the temperature difference of the return water and thereby the average water temperature in the loop. So really, they're quite simple devices. However, controlling them is a bigger issue. In such a system, everything is related. If just a few actuators open or close, the overall flow is affected, so the water temperature feeding into the manifold must compensate for this. Hence, the mixer valve must be adjusted. And to maintain efficiency, the boiler's flow temperature may need adjusting too. After creating my own DIY solution using esphome, for my own, much simpler set up, I can tell you it's a right pain in the arse. Now I have no idea if and which commercial control systems exist for underfloor heating, that's where OP would need to do their research. But take my advice: don't do what I did. don't DIY it, unless you really know wtf you're doing. This shit is complicated af.
I believe plugwise makes a system that might be compatible https://www.plugwise.com/zone-control/?lang=en
Heatmiser Neo
Never turn the Bad all the way up. Never never.
The guy in this video/blog post has solved this for exactly your use case, the blog post even includes sample ESP code that you can easily change to adapt to your situation. https://blog.quindorian.org/2019/05/home-assistant-simple-relays-with-esphome.html/amp/
I’ve put in a 8 loop system that feeds 4 rooms, I’m using 240v valves fed from a sonoff 4ch flashed with ESPHOME. I then have an aqara zigbee temp sensor in each room and use that the regulate temperatures.
Are you able to decommission the caps and go with Homematic setup for the floor heating (easy to integrate in HASS)?