I want to replace my thermostats. I got a simple honeywell scheduled thermostat when I replaced the Mercury ones, but there’s no actual benefit to those for my place that I’ve seen so far.
My unit is a two story unit with separate heating upstairs and downstairs. It uses the hot water pipes in the floors to heat from a central boiler for the condos. There are two valves, one for each floor and I currently have two thermostats. The thermostats are not well-placed, so remote sensors would be nice to have.
The biggest problem I have is that the heating system has to warm the floors to warm the house, and this has a long turn-around time before seeing any heating, what ends up happening is our house is either blazing hot, or freezing cold. Ideally something that can auto-tune the PID so it can figure out how slow our house is to react by learning.
If it was smart and had reports, that’s fine, but honestly I don’t care wildly over controlling it from my phone; I just really want to be able to set it to 18 and that it heats to that, and not 26.
Also, my thermostat is only fed by 2 wires, so I assume anything fancy will require running additional lines. I think its a 12v solenoid valve.
My house has in floor radiant heating and i’ve discovered it’s more economical to keep the temperature at 20C 24/7 365. i.e. short surges of heat for short durations rather than a long large surge to boost the temperature each morning. It also means the house temp is always perfect.
Forced air is very different. That will benefit from timed settings.
I’ve also been playing with this idea. I ran into a roadblock when I realized I needed to buy solonoids/relays to make it work, and would need 4 for my renal apartment. I figured it wouldn’t be worth it, but I just today got a $300 bill for a 600 sq, foot apartment
So, there are a few instructions online, like this: SST Is A Very Tidy ESP8266 Smart Thermostat | Hackaday to do esp based thermostat. You can modify that to relocate the sensor, and you can put in some nicer PID.
You won’t need to worry about switching 30 amps of 240 volt like I do if you just have tiny wires to contact, but you might need to figure out something to power the whole thing.
I haven’t found a “good cheap” solution out there that’s pre-existing.
I may start back up on my project after that bill, but, the worst of winter is likely over.
