UFH - Its Broke Me....

[Carrerahill]

11 minutes ago, Ed Davies said:

I think there's a problem that plumbers are motivated to oversize boilers. 

 

Always the case, also if they are on say 20% cover on the boiler, for every additional £100 the boiler costs he is on £20.

 

My brother had a new boiler fitted a year or two ago, boiler man sold him the biggest Worcester Bosch domestic unit they make - he was happy with this and asked for big, but part of me figures he actually created an issue for himself. Sort of luckily for him his Victorian property with 3.2m ceiling heights and no insulation probably actually benefits him in this situation.

 

 

[Ed Davies]

16 minutes ago, Carrerahill said:

You keep producing lots of good graphs from your house, it makes me think you have a control room and lots of sensors and a home management or at least monitoring system that I suspect you made, can you elaborate if you do?

 

Yes, I have my own system. Most of the work happens on a Raspberry Pi. Basically, various sensor inputs around the house get flung into an MQTT broker then some Python code reads it from there, stores it in a SQLite 3 database and serves it via HTTP (and websockets though I don't use that except for experiments, yet).

 

Sensors talking via Wi-Fi are a few ESP8266 devices made by VAir (http://shop.vair-monitor.com/) who doesn't seem to be coming back from the break in producing these devices, unfortunately. Two do temperature and humidity in the study and kitchen. Another does temperature, humidity, CO₂, pressure and light level in the bedroom. There's also an ESP32 which I coded myself in the living room measuring the temperature there and a Sonoff TH16 in the kitchen (again running my own firmware) logging the temperature in the fridge salad tray and controlling power to the fridge (because its thermostat seems poor).  Directly attached to the Pi is a DS18B20 1-wire sensor on the study radiator flow pipe and the desktop part of a CurrentCost meter which measures the current into the house (clamp round the feed between the main fuse and the meter). Part of the Python code queries checkwx.com for data from the nearest airport (Wick) once an hour and adds that to MQTT to be logged.

 

There are also a couple of associated Python programs which query the database via HTTP. One (houseplot.py) takes the data and feeds it into gnuplot to produce the sort of plots I show on here. Normally I have an instance of this program running in the background showing the main data for the house, updated every 30 seconds, on my second monitor which is handy for lots of things, like seeing what the heating's doing or when the washing machine's finished. The other (httpreader.py) gives a more numeric output, typically a CSV list of one or a few sensor topics which can be piped into ad hoc code for more detailed looks at particular subjects (e.g., for this: https://edavies.me.uk/2019/01/continuous/) but it can also do integration, averages and so on producing a JSON result.

 

It all just grewed and I think of it as the prototype to throw away. I like Python but it does get a bit unwieldy as code evolves and I'm currently thinking about a re-write in Rust but I need to get a bit more familiar with that language before diving in.

[epsilonGreedy]

3 hours ago, Ed Davies said:

Yes, I have my own system. Most of the work happens on a Raspberry Pi. Basically, various sensor inputs around the house get flung into an MQTT broker then some Python code reads it from there, stores it in a SQLite 3 database and serves it via HTTP (and websockets though I don't use that except for experiments, yet).

 

Sensors talking via Wi-Fi are a few ESP8266 devices made by VAir (http://shop.vair-monitor.com/) who doesn't seem to be coming back from the break in producing these devices, unfortunately.

 

 

Fab detail there Ed.

 

Since I am starting from scratch and want a low EMF house (i.e. as little WiFi as possible) are there wired alternatives for these sensors? My current plan is to wire the my house with an excess of POE capable Cat-6 cable in the hope this will accommodate future plans and technology trends.

[PeterW]

17 minutes ago, epsilonGreedy said:

 

Fab detail there Ed.

 

Since I am starting from scratch and want a low EMF house (i.e. as little WiFi as possible) are there wired alternatives for these sensors? My current plan is to wire the my house with an excess of POE capable Cat-6 cable in the hope this will accommodate future plans and technology trends.

 

Thinking of using a few Orange Pi Zero boards as PoE powered end points. Useful little platform and one cable and job done. 

[Onoff]

49 minutes ago, PeterW said:

 

Thinking of using a few Orange Pi Zero boards as PoE powered end points. Useful little platform and one cable and job done. 

 

Just got a Zero 1.3 recently but with the soldered header:

 

 

Along with a breakout board:

 

 

The boy is FINALLY getting down to doing my mates "Knight Rider" lights with ultra bright LEDs inset into his block paving under the sliding gate.

 

I can cope all day long with the hardware side but the Python is beyond me. Suppose I should learn...

[Ed Davies]

1 hour ago, epsilonGreedy said:

Since I am starting from scratch and want a low EMF house (i.e. as little WiFi as possible) are there wired alternatives for these sensors?

 

It certainly seems the wired sensors are less common. Arduinos do come with wired Ethernet connections but most have them as shields which plug on top. There was the Nanode which was an Arduino with a built in Ethernet connection (I have two kits, only made one of them up IIRC. It worked OK but I haven't made much use of it - doesn't seem a lot of point in developing much code for it if there aren't more available.)

 

https://www.amazon.co.uk/TOOGOO-ENC28J60-ethernet-Arduino-Webserver-Red/dp/B0721K1QZY

 

1-wire can, in theory, be run over quite long distances though I've always found it pretty flaky as wires get longer.

 

Another option would be serial networking to Arduinos but if you want lots of sensors you'd need to work out how they multiplex to the central machine. There are lots of existing protocols but I don't really know of one that would be easy to implement in quantity. Modbus? CAN bus?

 

Not sure of the likes of the Orange Pi. Probably a lot of power consumption if you want quite a few round the house.

 

I'm not bothered about EMF one way or the other but still would prefer things to be wired where possible for security and robustness.

[SteamyTea]

I use all wired sensors on my collection of RPis.  Have run some DHTs and DS18B20 at the end of 10m cables.  The DHTs are not that great for reliability anyway, but not that many missed readings in the scheme of things.  The 1-Wire stuff is very good, but as soon as you attach more than about 7 to the same cable, problems happen.  I just reduced the Ohms of the resistor to up the cable voltage.  That seemed to sort it.

Have played with some ESP8266 as remote sensors.  I really must have a play again.  I got stuck on sending the data securely, but that was my lack of microPython skills rather than anything wrong with the ESP8266.

After decades of only liking wired stuff (my mechanical engineering background), I like the idea of wireless more and more these days.  My CurrentCost Optisense on my electric meter has been chugging along for about 7 years now, not changed the battery yet.  Shame the CurrentCost are not about anymore.

I am not worried about EMF, not enough energy in it to worry about.

[Toppers]

I'm told my heating system is a Y plan system, I have flow and return pipes running from the loft to the ground floor it has a 3 port valve next to the boiler. Could i tee off the flow and return directly or would I need to fit a 2 port valve somewhere?

[Carrerahill]

16 hours ago, Ed Davies said:

 

Yes, I have my own system. Most of the work happens on a Raspberry Pi. Basically, various sensor inputs around the house get flung into an MQTT broker then some Python code reads it from there, stores it in a SQLite 3 database and serves it via HTTP (and websockets though I don't use that except for experiments, yet).

 

Sensors talking via Wi-Fi are a few ESP8266 devices made by VAir (http://shop.vair-monitor.com/) who doesn't seem to be coming back from the break in producing these devices, unfortunately. Two do temperature and humidity in the study and kitchen. Another does temperature, humidity, CO₂, pressure and light level in the bedroom. There's also an ESP32 which I coded myself in the living room measuring the temperature there and a Sonoff TH16 in the kitchen (again running my own firmware) logging the temperature in the fridge salad tray and controlling power to the fridge (because its thermostat seems poor).  Directly attached to the Pi is a DS18B20 1-wire sensor on the study radiator flow pipe and the desktop part of a CurrentCost meter which measures the current into the house (clamp round the feed between the main fuse and the meter). Part of the Python code queries checkwx.com for data from the nearest airport (Wick) once an hour and adds that to MQTT to be logged.

 

There are also a couple of associated Python programs which query the database via HTTP. One (houseplot.py) takes the data and feeds it into gnuplot to produce the sort of plots I show on here. Normally I have an instance of this program running in the background showing the main data for the house, updated every 30 seconds, on my second monitor which is handy for lots of things, like seeing what the heating's doing or when the washing machine's finished. The other (httpreader.py) gives a more numeric output, typically a CSV list of one or a few sensor topics which can be piped into ad hoc code for more detailed looks at particular subjects (e.g., for this: https://edavies.me.uk/2019/01/continuous/) but it can also do integration, averages and so on producing a JSON result.

 

It all just grewed and I think of it as the prototype to throw away. I like Python but it does get a bit unwieldy as code evolves and I'm currently thinking about a re-write in Rust but I need to get a bit more familiar with that language before diving in.

Thank you for this! I may come back and pick your brain at some point!

 

My plan is to build the system up in my workshop - then deploy it once I have it doing what I want it to do as I would love to be able to collect data like this.