Is this a non-standard thermostat control mechanism? I don’t know what’s common in apartments. All my houses have the thermostat wired to the HVAC (and are easily replaceable by the resident).
Attacking My Landlord's Boiler
41–50 of 232 posts
Re: Attacking My Landlord's Boiler
#42I wonder what the ideal one-size fits all thermostat looks like. The one in my apartment has a “feature” a lot of US thermostats now have, where you set four ordered times called wake, leave, return, and sleep and the temperature you want the space in each interval. I know very few people who actually live in a household where everyone wakes, leaves, returns, and sleeps on the same schedule every day. I work from hom…
I'm still of the opinion that a dial works best. Especially in modern homes (in Europe at least), there seems to be a school of thought that you should just leave your thermostat at the same temperature at all times - the theory being that warming up a cold house in the morning costs more energy than maintaining a stable temperature. Anyway, my ideal setup would be to install 'smart' thermostat taps on every radiator…
We've used the Tado system with a central boiler and smart radiator knobs for a few years. It's worked fine and hooks up to Home Assistant and can do the things you describe. I'm sure there are some alternatives.
Re: Attacking My Landlord's Boiler
#43I wonder what the ideal one-size fits all thermostat looks like. The one in my apartment has a “feature” a lot of US thermostats now have, where you set four ordered times called wake, leave, return, and sleep and the temperature you want the space in each interval. I know very few people who actually live in a household where everyone wakes, leaves, returns, and sleeps on the same schedule every day. I work from hom…
The obvious solution is a "wake time" of 8 am, "leave time" of 8:01, "return" 8:02, "sleep" 8:03. Then just set the sleep temperature to your desired temp and the remaining ones to something reasonably close, or if it doesn't automatically switch between heating and air conditioning, set it for the no-op for the season (i.e. the highest possible temp in summer, and the lowest possible in winter) for those three minutes.
Re: Attacking My Landlord's Boiler
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you missed where it was explained that the apartment is rented and therefore you cannot modify anything.
Replacing a thermostat is very easy to do though. And very easy to revert too. Usually it's just acting as a simple relay (on-off switch) so there's two physical wires. I've got my Hive thermostat running great with various Bosch and Vaillant boilers. And it works great with HA. Some newer boilers have 12V "smart" controls but still expose 230V "dumb" call for heating pins.
Agreed (I set up our dual zone Nest-controllee heating so I know it's not difficult), but what happens if the landlord visits and isn't happy with you having done this? It would be a pain to have to revert this if you knew the landlord was coming.
Re: Attacking My Landlord's Boiler
#45I wonder what the ideal one-size fits all thermostat looks like. The one in my apartment has a “feature” a lot of US thermostats now have, where you set four ordered times called wake, leave, return, and sleep and the temperature you want the space in each interval. I know very few people who actually live in a household where everyone wakes, leaves, returns, and sleeps on the same schedule every day. I work from hom…
I'm still of the opinion that a dial works best. Especially in modern homes (in Europe at least), there seems to be a school of thought that you should just leave your thermostat at the same temperature at all times - the theory being that warming up a cold house in the morning costs more energy than maintaining a stable temperature. Anyway, my ideal setup would be to install 'smart' thermostat taps on every radiator…
> the theory being that warming up a cold house in the morning costs more energy than maintaining a stable temperature
I've heard this theory a lot too, but it doesn't match with physics. A warm house loses more energy than a cold house, due to a higher temperature difference allowing easier heat transfer. So in most homes, with radiators and high temperature CV, it's way more efficient to just turn it off when you gone.
One exception is when you have a very well insulated house, combined with floor heating and a very efficient, low temperature heat pump. In this case, it takes a lot of time for temperature to move in the house and it's already incredibly efficient.
Re: Attacking My Landlord's Boiler
#46I wonder what the ideal one-size fits all thermostat looks like. The one in my apartment has a “feature” a lot of US thermostats now have, where you set four ordered times called wake, leave, return, and sleep and the temperature you want the space in each interval. I know very few people who actually live in a household where everyone wakes, leaves, returns, and sleeps on the same schedule every day. I work from hom…
I'm still of the opinion that a dial works best. Especially in modern homes (in Europe at least), there seems to be a school of thought that you should just leave your thermostat at the same temperature at all times - the theory being that warming up a cold house in the morning costs more energy than maintaining a stable temperature. Anyway, my ideal setup would be to install 'smart' thermostat taps on every radiator…
> the theory being that warming up a cold house in the morning costs more energy than maintaining a stable temperature
This is only true if the heating happens quickly and the system is less efficient when heating quickly. Otherwise, this doesn't make sense from a physics standpoint. A temporarily lower temperature differential means less kWh of heat lost.
Re: Attacking My Landlord's Boiler
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think in real life there are more constraints. For example there are people that sleep better at a lower temperature than the daily one (so leaving the thermostat at the same temperature it's a minus for them). Regarding "what is better" from energy efficiency, I would prefer a system that "check it" because my guess is that it depends a lot based on the individual situation. I mean everybody is going crazy over "I…
In slightly cooler climates, the answer for sleep is to open windows. This works in much of Europe, even through summer. But of course, not really feasible in Atlanta or Phoenix. Nighttime temps are too warm.
Open windows in a city often means you are invinting in pollution, both air and noise.
Re: Attacking My Landlord's Boiler
#48Cool as fuc + very nice blog design.
Furry cartoons are catching on.
Re: Attacking My Landlord's Boiler
#49The legit Hackrf One is known to have frequency smearing, I wouldn’t use one off Aliexpress to transmit without testing it with a spectrum analyzer first (which you probably don’t have if you are buying knockoffs from Aliexpress).
What does frequency smearing mean in this context?
You're trying to transmit (only) on e.g. 433 MHz, but you actually transmit on 433 MHz and a bell curve around it.
Re: Attacking My Landlord's Boiler
#50> I also have it so the heating turns off when I go into town and turns back on when I'm just a few train stops away so my place is nice and toasty for me getting home!
If your goal is saving energy/money, you don’t want a system capable of going from cool to toasty in 20 minutes.
Instead, you want a system that runs (much) lower water circulation temperatures (giving lower losses in the unconditioned spaces and more even room heating). That can be done to any condensing boiler by just turning down the flow target temperature.
A second layer of optimization on top of this is the addition of outdoor reset/weather compensation which will adjust that flow temperature based on the outside temperature, giving a flow temperature than can just barely restore the building to the desired setpoint temp.
With mine properly tuned, I was targeting having the thermostat act more like a high-limit and for it to call for heat between 22 and 24 hours per day while not overheating the house. That often meant flow temps in the 110°F (warm day) to 135°F (below freezing day) range. Compared to the prior winter (at a constant 160°F flow), the house used 8-15% less gas and was wildly more comfortable. (This setup does preclude using deep setback settings, which also can save money, because recovery times are necessarily long in such a scheme, unless you have an even smarter control system that can run perfectly tuned water most times but hotter water during recovery from setbacks.)