Water Furnace Geo Thermal System (Symphony)

After using it today, I wouldn’t recommend trying it. It’s a massive mess. Most things don’t work & that’s just the tip of the iceberg with what I found today.

Had a long chat with WaterFurnace today, not my HVAC dealer, to iron out some of my issues :slight_smile:

They were very responsive to my issues. On a side note, I have a read-only (10 minute delay) SmartDevice for it :smile:

So i have been thinking of doing this as well. What were the issues that you ran into? And have you been able to write to the device as well, say something like changing temp and turning on and off the fan etc?

I sent you a message about it since it’s not really a public API & I can’t release my driver publicly :slight_smile:

Whoops, I did not think to look for my messages today. I will check there and respond

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Hello Guys,

I am a waterfurance installer in the Atlanta Area. I read into some of your concerns and wanted to clarify a few things. Firstly I am not affiliated with Waterfurnace other than I install a lot of their products and I understand it very well. The 5 series units are either Analog or Digitally (communicating) controlled. Analog control is standard thermostat interface that has been in use since the dawn of time. This is great for HA interface since most HA systems have their own Analog thermostats. However no home automation system will be able to perform any task beyond run time, temperature control and off/on. Basically that’s all a thermostat does anyways except now you can do it remotely and keep track of how long it either heated or cooled. Ecobee, nest, Control 4, Lutron would never expect to, or know how to gather additional information such as entering water temperature, leaving water temperature, read the error codes and allow remote diagnostics of a specific Geothermal unit. Their products are too broad spectrum or Generic. The symphony system is custom designed to read and monitor equipment specific details such as fan speed, compressor speed, run time, loop performance and energy monitoring. This more advanced form of data control and gathering can only be done digitally which means if you have a 7 series unit you must use the symphony system and there is no way around it. If you have a 5 series unit you can use either the open market HA system or the symphony system as this unit will allow either analog or communicating interface One side note. If you have zoning on your 5 series unit and you are using the older intellizone zoning system you are ok to use an open market HA system. If you have the newer intellizone 2 24V zoning system you will either have to use the symphony HA system or replace the intellizone 2 24v with an open market zone board such as Honeywell or EWC in order to interface with an open market HA system. I hope this clarifies the contributions I read. BTW Ecobee has no clue if they can work with a waterfurnace system. 5 Series yes, 5 Series Zoned yes with modifications, 7 Series no. Simple.

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Thanks for the reply. I am running a Series 7 here in VA. I am still looking to add this to my HA system. However, for now I am finding that the overall benefit is reduced due to the overall efficiency of the geo-thermal system. It is nice to know what it is doing, but I have found no reason to change temp (and as you know with Geo this may do more harm than good economically). I did create a system that would simply turn on the house fan and bring outside air inside when it was within a certain band of humidity and temp outside. This works great on those nice days where it is nice to open windows and let the fresh air into the house.

However your ping has reminded me that I need to continue to look into Symphony for the house. Also, given that it is still a logic based unit. Once you are able to monitor the signal traffic, you should be able to figure out the calls for the data and how it is translated to the head unit.

Have you made any improvements on your access to the WaterFurnace private API via the Symphony? I’ve had mine running for a few months now and I’m really interested in expanding the data collection components to be able to run my own reports, rather than those tied to the interface they provide. Seems like your read only approach may be just what I’m looking for.

Any chance I could get that code off of you? I’m working on an openhab module, and your research would help speed things up!

I have been struggling for years live in CT - have had an original ecobee (Varistors removed) hooked up to 1 zone of a 2 zone waterfurnace system . I’m worried my system is not running efficiently. I would try nest or newer ecobee etc. any advice ?

My set up has Premier IntelliZone 4 Zone Control - model ZCK4 (also VENMAR CONSTRUCTO , and waterfurnace NSH036 Single Speed 34,000 BTU horizontal unit with hot water desuperheater 1 – EAMH10 10kw auxiliary heater)

The ecobee EB-STAT-01 on Zone 1

Water furnace tstat TP32U03 on Zone 2.

On my top floor I have a non zoned WaterFurnace NSZ022 with nest gen 1

I know this thread is old, but has anyone had any luck getting the symphony system to work with the smart things hub? I was thinking about trying to do a Wireshark collection on my network, but if someone has already made some progress, I’d gladly take advantage of their experience!

I have a Series 7 unit with Intellizone2.
Does Smartthings have a screen scrape or webpage input mechanism?
Since Symphony has a web-based thermostat, as long as something can “click” the appropriate spot on the web page, we can Automate this:
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Hi Tim,
I saw your post on smart things and saw you were from Atlanta. I live down in Newnan and have been looking at installing a geothermal heat pump and looking at the WF 7 series. I live on a lake ( lake Redwine) and was considering running a closed loop system down to the lake.
Long story short, would you be interested in coming to look at the layout to give me recommendation on what would work and what would be the most cost effective and efficient system.

Update. There’s been an exciting development. Waterfurnace now integrates with Alexa. So you can write Alexa routines to read and control the thermostats.

Also Home Assistant has a integration as well. If Home Assistant can work with Waterfurnace, I’m sure a savvy Smartthings guru could write a device handler for it!