I started a home automation project in Dec 2019 because our heating system was not working correctly and I thought it would be a good time to convert to a smart heating system. Our heating controls were poorly laid out with a boiler time switch at one end of the house, zone valves in the middle and hot press at the other end which made choosing an off the shelf smart solution difficult.
The issue with our heating was the zone valve motor heads were failing regularly, at first I thought they may have been of poor design, but later discovered that due to de-centralized nature of our heating system that they were just wired to the room stats and independant of the boiler, this ment that if the boiler is off and the room stat is below threshold then the zone valve would be energized possibly most of the summer when heating was off.
So after looking at different off the shelf solutions I found none were going to solve my problem or else would have been far too expensive. I looked to the DIY solutions like OpenHab and Home Assitant and a few others. Both of theses solutions can be run from a small low powered computer such as a Raspberry Pi. I settled on Home Assistant, but either option I think would have been fine.
Home Assitant has much more potential than just running a heating System, so I thought about what else might be useful to automate, So I have a number of other projects running around the house and farm which can be easily integrated and controlled by the same app or web interface running on the one Raspberry Pi.
I will create sepaerate posts for the different parts of my overall automation system.
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