I’m thinking about ditching my regular thermostat (Netatmo btw, cool device!) and substituting it for radiator valves and a main relay where the thermostat currently lives…
After that, somehow program (might/will need help here in the future if I do take this path) a sequence that if x room is getting cold but the main relay is off, then turn the relay on and the valve in question also on, but not if everyone’s gone…
I currently know if everyone’s home or not with a virtual switch, not a mode…
Ideas? Pros? Cons?
EDIT: Reason for this idea is because the wife and I usually watch tv at night (don’t all couples do that?) while our daughter sleeps in her room… and we’d like to be a little warmer, but not on the daughter’s room… she’s cozy and warm enough…
Well the obvious “con” is that right now thermostats (even connected ones) are supposed to generally fail-safe, to keep you from purposely freezing your house, unless you actually want to.
With something like this, you could have a failure in a number of places that would cause anything from discomfort to actual property damage if something goes wrong.
I understand the appeal though, having a big house with radiators is always funky because you can’t really shut off vents as you would with forced air. What about some crazy individual Pi/Arduino-control of the radiator valves per room, so you could have some sort of independent logic that would keep an ST failure from messing up your whole house?
The hardware should be cheap enough, although I’m too lazy right now to come up with an actual solution… just giving you the general idea so you can run with it…
That freezing’s actually no problem! Our problem would actually be the other way around! Have the house BURN!
Generally our house, thanks to the neighbours on the lower 5 floors (yes, we live in a flat), is usually quite warm so it never goes to really freezing (thinking about NYC right now)…
I use cheaper programmable TRVs, not the more expensive remotely controllable ones, so the bedroom, study and some other rooms do have their own schedules. My Netatmo runs a normal schedule for the living room and non-TRV radiators, and if one of the other rooms is getting too cold (measured by various other temperature sensors in the rooms, I can trigger a temporary boost to the Netatmo setpoint via SmartThings, and hence this fires up the boiler.
Mainly this is for energy saving as I can more easily avoid heating rooms when I know they are unoccupied, such as the bedrooms during daytime, and the guest room when there is no guest
I am using these TRVs, found them pretty good so far.
I do get some peace of mind from the fact that the Netatmo will continue to work on its own stored schedule whether or not there is internet access, so there is a level of backup for those times when SmartThings is offline or suffering from glitches.
Although I really like Netatmo, I’m thinking of switching to Nest as v3 can control hot water too.
