Advanced Heating Controls
Published on 8 Dec 2009 at 8:22 am.
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From earlier deliberations and measurements it had become clear that there are savings to be made in heating a typical suburban property. This is because the bolier controls are usually quite crude. In our case we have a 3 year old condensing boiler. The air temperature is controlled by a thermostat which would have to be adjusted daily for optimum efficiency. If not the house is either too hot or too cold depending on the outside temperature.
The thermostat works as intended. However, if the outside temperature is rising the thermostat can’t anticipate the effect of this on the inside temperature.
Some fancy kit is available to compensate for this but it’s expensive and I thought it would be more interesting to rig something up, given the fact that I already have remote-controllable sockets and a continuous stream of temperature data.
Controlling the boiler is easy. I used a byebyestandby socket plus a relay to produce an isolated contact pair as required by the boiler’s control system. I left the existing thermostat in the circuit, generously set. The existing timer is set to always on for heating. Hot water is unaffected by these changes.
For the moment I am using a BBSB “online controller”. However, the Arduino that looks after the sensors could just as well do this job if and when I get round to reprogramming it. At time of writing the Arduino has been running for many months whereas the BBSB has fallen over a couple of times. I may get round to that reprogramming job sooner than I expected.
To control this in line with our requirements I have a simple program on the server which wakes up every so often and checks the time settings and the temperature inside and out. As appropriate, it can send commands to the BBSB socket to turn the boiler on and off.
As the settings are held on the server I can control them from any browser, including the one on my phone.
I shall be observing gas consumption to see whether this produces the expected savings. My family will be monitoring comfort levels and I know I won’t need an extra jumper for Christmas.
