Comfosense 67 reliability

[hauntedicecreamvan]

I have a Zehnder Comfoair 180, with a Comfosense 67/CCS controller (RS232 comms). The controller has capacitive pads under the plastic faceplate, and after working fine for a couple of months with light usage it suddenly become unreliable with missed button presses, gradually getting worse to the point that it had to be operated with the plastic plate removed, and eventually mixing up key presses or phantom presses. I swapped it out for a spare Comfosense and the replacement is working fine.

 

Has anyone here experienced reliability issues with these controllers? It seems potentially quite fragile, being based on a flexible PCB which sits wedged between the plastic display surround and the front cover.

 

I don't see myself interacting with it much from now on anyway, since flow rates are commissioned, and boost is controlled via the bathroom switch input by Home Assistant based on air quality and humidity rise/fall rules.

[Mike]

Not yet. I also plan to get mine hooked up to Home Assistant in due course.

[JohnMo]

Obvious question, is why do you even need a controller - once set what is there to adjust. MVHR commission forget, except filter cleans/changes

[hauntedicecreamvan]

6 hours ago, Mike said:

Not yet. I also plan to get mine hooked up to Home Assistant in due course.

are you looking at integrating via the serial interface or just using binary inputs to trigger boost?

 

I considered the RS232 proxy approach, with an ESP32, so that I could keep the Comfosense while still allowing HA to read/set itself, but decided it was too much added complication, so just hooked up a dry-contact relay to the bathroom switch input. It would be nice to see the outputs from the various sensors and status of the summer bypass in Home Assistant though.

 

2 hours ago, JohnMo said:

Obvious question, is why do you even need a controller - once set what is there to adjust. MVHR commission forget, except filter cleans/changes

Probably not needed long-term.

 

The CA180 LUXE doesn't have any onboard display/buttons, so the Comfosense is needed to set the flow rates during commissioning, but after that its all stored in the CA180 itself so theoretically could run without it (or with something 3rd party running the reverse-engineered serial interface commands).

 

I was initially using the Comfosense schedule to set some crude time-based boost that coincide with daily shower times, but now that the relay input is configured through Home Assistant, boost logic is based on CO2 sensors in habitable rooms, an air quality/VOC sensor in the kitchen, and humidity rate of change in the kitchen/utility/bathroom - I shouldn't need to touch the Comfosense much, if at all, going forward (assuming I have thresholds set up correctly).

Edited 6 hours ago by hauntedicecreamvan