Workshop Thermostats

[jaunty monolith]

Where I work we wanted a way to have more control over heating, and after looking a bit around, we could not find one solution which would do all the things we wanted. We both wanted to be able to lower temperature a bit at night, and only turn the heat up Monday to Thursday. We also wanted to be able to pause heating in rooms where the doors are open so forklifts van drive in and out, and also be able to synchronize with some air to air heat pumps. The only solution I found which could do it all, was to make my own thermostats with esphome and then install home assistant on our server.

The thermostat itself is pretty simple, but for reliability I decided to design a PCB for them, and use an external off the shelf power supply and relay to do most of the work. Temperature is just measured with a 18B20 temperature sensor.

The box to the left is the finished result. Everything inside is din rail mounted.

[sage gate]

I did something similar at home. Each room has a radiator with a Z-Wave thermostatic valve, an emonTH from open energy monitor.org and a Zigbee motion sensor from IKEA. Then, in Home Assistant, I have a virtual thermostat for each room that controls boiler demand and several node-red flows to control the rad valves and thermostats based on occupancy, movement, season etc.

On top of that is Schedy running on appdaemon to set a big picture view of required room temps.

It’s been running for about 18 months now and is very reliable.

[uneven rivet]

Love the side mounting, were the angled pins easy to fin for two rows ?

[jaunty monolith]

Yes, they are very easy to find. Pretty much all places I normally shop got them.

[uneven rivet]

Thanks for the idea, need to think of it now ! Will check if a side has all the pins I need