Home Heating might not strictly be farming related but much of this can be modified for all sorts of farming automations, from milk tank temprature monitoring, automatic calf milk mixers to green house automations or frost protection.
I Stated off with 2 of theses Smart Thermostats from eBay
and a smart boiler switch like this one from Amazon, both the thermostats and switch work with the Tuya or Smart Life Apps. Initially I setup my heating system using the Tuya App and everthing worked fine except for one issue which I found unacceptable, these devices depend on a connection through the internet to the cloud, so basically if my internet connection or the cloud server in China were down then my heating scheadule would not work.
I installed Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi 3 following the instructions from https://www.home-assistant.io/getting-started/. And added the devices, the first version of my build replicated my original heating system just with remote control from the app, it was winter so it was important that basic functionality worked straight away. Over time I added automations to ensure zone valves de-energize when boiler is powered off.
After getting the Heating working the way that I liked, one thing I noticed is that the hot water was not being heated as hot as I would like because now the rooms stats were dictating when the boiler started and stopped. We have a solar system but this does not always heat the water fully in the winter months. So it was now time to add some more smart devices to control and monitor the hot water. I found it suprisingly hard to find commercial devices to monitor the temperature of the hot water tank so I had to look for a more custom solution.
I came across MySensors.org which is a great resource for many types of DIY sensors and they are compatible with Home Assistant. This also led me to PiHome.eu who make their own Home Heating OS for the Raspberry Pi and and also their own hardware based on MySensors.org. They are selling them on Adverts.ie and I contacted them and ordered 3 tank sesnsors and 2 room sensors, 1 controller, a 4 channel relay and a 1 channel relay. The 1 channel relay controls my hot water zone valve, the 4 channel relay I haven’t used yet except in testing.
I also bought another 20A Tuya Immersion Switch and created automations to monitor the hot water, and turn on Immersion heater if both solar and the boiler have failed to heat the water by a certain time in the evening.
The house has 2 heating zones Upstairs and Downstairs, but some rooms were getting a little too warm when the zone stat was at a comfortable level for the room that its in, so I tooked at TRV solutions and decided on a few wired actuators, controlled by Shelly smart switches.
With the hardware in place and automations running, the hardest thing to setup in Home Assistant is a simple sheduling GUI, the one above I’ve created after looking at many different examples on the Home Assistant Forums. I’ve included my Home Assistant yaml configuration in text files below. The week day buttons use a Button Card custom component.
Graphs are a useful function of Home Assistant for displaying and monitoring how the system is preforming.
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