Heating & Cooling automations that save you money 

Why don't you use the daikirin split ac to heat up those rooms for the time you are using those like the kitchen cause the air heating is far more efficient and faster especially for all those presence based situations? The underfloor heating which seems to be based on water suffers from the big lag it takes to heat up the floor and ground till it heats up the air in the room. If that has become warmer than half a day is over. And if you turn it down during night then the result is a cold morning and warm night usually. And Daikirin are usually high efficient which means the best heaters cause from 1 kWh electricity invested you gain about 4 to 6 kWh heat and that heat is instant warm air. Constant floor temperature is not always the best choice and therefore I would try to lower the amount of heat from that source and turn the ac heating on. Can save a lot of energy due to efficiency even with our mitsubishi, highly reliable but a COP about 5 - not as good as yours, but quiet.

Hi, cool video, i did not know about the scene snapshot! i will definitly apply that to my hass setup! A tip: heatpumps(ac's) dont like starting and stopping of their compressors, the more start and stops the more power the system uses and reduces livespan of the unit. My local daiking installer said to use the modulating capacity of the units when automating. Instead of turning the AC off try increasing the temperature step by step so the unit kicks in to a lower modulation. I meassured my Daiking units to go as low as 40Watts. I turn them off after 25 minutes with a open window detected by increase target temperature 1C every 5 minutes. Often the door/window is closed before that time is up. I still saved energy but avoided a compressor restart including the resulting power spike and hardwork that the unit has to do on startup.

I’m building a new smart home from the ground up and I’m implementing a lot of the same stuff, nice to see you had the same ideas. One thing we do that helps is to automatically open the exterior blinds to let in or block the sun depending on interior temperature. For the in floor heating, you can get electric valves to control the amount of water to a given circuit to lower the temperature in the bedroom at night without turning the heating on/off. We’ve got solar panels installed which I’ve hooked up to all systems (dynamic car charging capacity, AC units set to “undercool” the house to use up more energy, buffering heat in the boiler when we’ve got some extra capacity or in the future a lower spot price, remote start for the washing machine). Around here we barely get anything for the power we transfer to the grid so it makes more sense to use it as much as possible.

Good video. For the maintenance pump run you could check the weather forecast and delay for a hot day. Controlling AC by a door requires caution as it could lead to many more on/off cycles than normal. There is short cycle protection built in to the AC, but its minimal.

Great video. It would be great have a walkthrough of how you created the energy dashboard and linked to Octopus. I'm with Octopus, have solar and battery storage, but just can't seem to get anywhere with the creation of an energy dashboard. Really need some help or a step by step guide if possible please. Thanks for the great honest and informative videos, they really are helpful for another UK HA user. With disabilities having a smart home can really help.

why not run cold water through the floor heating during the summer? helps staying cool and fixes potential the pump hazard.

Really good ideas for further integration of HVAC into HA. Couple of points though, those Daikin splits are most likely reversable so can be used for space heating as well as cooling, these generally run at 300-400% efficiency in heating mode so may work out cheaper for space heating than running the underfloor heating and depending on the quantity of units you have across the house you can quite likely use them to reduce the heating season for the boiler. Somebody else also made a comment about zoning heating and using more energy, this is true but depends on the type of gas boiler you have (condensing vs non condesning), if you have a condensing boiler it would be worth monitoring the flow and return temperatures because you need a certain differential between the two to get the most efficiency out of it, this could be quite easily monitored within HA and automations configured to ensure that the loading on the system is correct to ensure condensing. If your boiler is not a condensing boiler then feel free to zone away. Lastly given that you apparently have space for outdoor units, have underfloor heating and your house is well insulated it would be well worth looking into replacing the boiler with a heatpump, in terms of running costs it should be pretty similar to gas (assuming it is sized and fitted correctly) but you can also load shift with them so can take advantage of variable electricity tarrifs to minimise cost (such as running the heatpump for hot water over night on cheap rate electricity)

9:45 hah! imagine 28C being enough to trigger the thermostats ON :p better make it 38! future proof it

Whenever I start working, I connect my laptop to external monitors at home. (I live alone so others would need to adjust this part accordingly) Whenever the number of monitors changes on my laptop from 1 to 2, I turn off my bedroom heater, and turn on the office one. Same thing in the evening when I disconnect.

I’m now considering combining the thermostat for AC (essentially for cooling) and TRV (for heat only) - what do you think I should do to accomplish that? Do you use separate thermostat? Thanks and good content

Has anyone done this with electric underfloor heating given the surplus electricity from solar panels / battery or just off peak electricity prices

Not knocking the HACS Octopus Energy intregration via API, but if you have smart meters connected to the DCC (i.e. SMETS2 or upgraded SMETS1), get a Hildebrand Glow instead and pipe your energy data into Home Assistant locally via MQTT and get instant power readings and gas every thirty minutes.

Thanks for the tip on running the pumps I will steal that one. BTW I found the HACS Heatmiser integration more reliable than the Homekit one. I also have a couple of DateTime helpers for when we go away and schedule taking the heating out of standby, based on our expected return less 6 hours, so the house has time to warm up and I don't have to remember to do it.

Thank you for showing your setup and the automations. We have a similar setup with a central gas heating (ZigBee contact reading 0,1m³ impulses on the gasmeter) and AC from Daikin in 3 rooms. One important finding was, that in the "inbetween" times, when heating usualy starts or stops, heating with the AC can be much more efficient than running the gas heating system. Further AC heating can heat up a room in a very short time - from 16°C base to comfortable it is just ~20 minutes, the used energy is surprisingly low and most of the electricity we can get from the solar roof. By lowering the circulating water temperature of the gas heating and mixed heating whe were able to lower our gas consumption by app. 30% and electrical energy for AC during winter was ~300kWh only (50% solar). For the schedues I use Node Red (HA) with the "Light Scheduler"-Node.

Hi! I have the same Daikin and when I got it, there was no reliable integration into HA that did not involve the cloud. I run HA specifically because I don't want to rely on third party cloud accounts for my house to function. I'll look into it again, but if you see this, please give me a little more info if you can. I ended up getting infra red remotes for HA to switch the units on and off, but it doesn't give me access to the full array of data and controls for the units, of course.

I did not know you were an Aussie! Great video, thanks!

1000 degrees F....Yep That math checks out.

HI, love your videos, thanks for them :) whats the little square wall panels you use (min 4:20), I am interested to purchase them.

What's the HA tablet interface at 11 min mark? Pretty cool.. thanks!

too complex chat for an amoeba to follow 👋

With regards to the guest room. If the guest room shares internal walls with rooms you do want to heat these rooms will lose heat to the guest room due to the temp difference. Internal walls are unlikely to be insulted in a brick home. The heat geek channel had shown that on some cases or is better i.e. cheaper to heat all the rooms

Request an Octopus mini for real time emergency readings. Gas readings will be available every 30min

Im no expert in the field by any means, but could be worth looking into if your hearing system supports open therm. This is going to be my approach when we move in a few weeks. Definitely a more efficient way to run a boiler if it has the option and i know google nest supports open therm. Another great video by the way! Look forward to your next home auto project!

Are the heating system and AC interlocked in HA so they don’t fight against each other?

Hello. Just wondering if you can advise. I have the same thermostats but I am wondering: if I want to use just home assistant to configure the thermostats then do I require the Neo hub bridge?

Which Daikin model do you have and how does it connect to Home Assistant? It seems Daikin has multiple apps, all with different API permissions.

Hi, I have my Aircon connected through IR with the Switchbot Hub Mini. Does anybody know how to integrate this to Home assistant? Thanks in advance

Great video. You mention in the video that you didn't do too much research on what you'd need - but I was wondering if you can share your tips on where you'd normally search? My system is 18+ years old and so has no remote connectivity. I have a few A/C units that are controlled via a wired thermostat, and I have underfloor heating that works with simple "on/off" thermostats on each floor. So before I can even think about automations etc - first I need to "smarten" everything up.

I really like the idea of running the underfloor heating for a short while, I would like to implement this on my system too, could you share the automation YAML's please? If only as a guide... pausing a video doesn't quite work too well 🥰 Thanks!

Hey, I too have Octopus Energy, Can you explain how to go about integrating it into Home Assistant? Thanks

Thanks for the tip on running the heating system periodically! I’ve set it using a calendar automation so I can see when things are due to happen. I’d not thought of using Home Assistant as a Facilities Management system before! First time with calendar automation and first time with using Scenes for snapshots, too. The only problem I have is that the Tado integration doesn’t seem to want to go back to Automatic mode.

Thanks for the video. I have the same thermostats, good to know HA can handle them. Though they are off most of the time as either the room is not in use, or they are covered by the central heating. I have a few hive controlled zones too. These are in HA. Though not much automation yet.

The Airconditioning automations are something I have been looking into for a while, but struggled to find. I am in Australia, so split systems are fairly common. Mitsubishi airconditioners are really easy to integrate into home automation as well. There is a project online that uses an ESP chip and connects directly to the same port that connects to the genuine mitsubish wifi module. They've been good for me :)

Interesting to see others with house modes like guest and holiday. I am using standard radiators so I can re-heat the home very quickly. I have automations to set a sleeping and morning temperature for the heating based on the time of my morning alarm on my phone.

How did you create guest and holiday mode?

Wish I could get my heatmiser to talk to home assistant, when I try via the home kit I get an error saying "The device is already pairing with another controller" and that's as far as I can get :(

What are the little touchscreens you use?

HVAC engineer here. Depending on your DAIKIN fancoil models, they also may have a heat function. One criticism of radiant floor systems is that they are slow to warm up and they perform best over long cold periods. Contrast that to heat pumps which warm up quickly and work better during shoulder heating periods. If your fan coils support heating, there is an opportunity to configure your controls to select which heating option is preferred. You can use the heat pumps as a supplemental heat source in case the room temperature falls too low. Additionally, you can set a lockout of the radiant system if the outdoor temperature is too high, letting the fan coils bridge a small temperature gap even when it’s relatively warm outside.

If you switch to a smart tariff like Octopus Cosy, you could use your AC to heat the house in winter and save money . If you use your boiler, lower the flow temperature as much as possible. I run it at 45C , with a salmonella cycle once a month. Or right after coming back from holidays.

Heating is the most useful automation

What good timing. I'm actually doing my final test run of my home built touchscreen thermostat. It's based on a raspberry pi. It uses their official 7" touch screen and the pimoroni automation hat. I created a dedicated user for it in HA, it boots up in kiosk mode to its dashboard. I loaded it with node red and it connects to HA through an instance of node red via MQTT. On HA I created 2 generic thermostat entities, one for cooling and heating. They reference an MQTT switch in node red and that triggers the relays on the pi, which will be wired to the control wires for my HVAC. An added benefit is that the pi screen also serves as a fully functional controller for my HA setup.

I’m new to HA and am trying to figure out how to program modes like your “Holiday mode” or “guest mode.” I had similar modes programmed into my security system that had less capable home automations. Can you explain setting up those modes?

Imagine how much energy can be saved if automations became standard practice in all houses.

Great video as usual! So does that mean you have a thermostat in each room that can control the radiator in that room individually? I'm curious as to whether that was just the way your system was set up as I have to buy a smart TRV for each radiator in my house, in addition to a central room thermostat?

An interesting video Alan, thnx! Still running HA on proxmox?

Great video!

Tks for the share! What are those screens that you are using! Are they android? Tks

We bought a bunch of Daikin AC units for the primary reason of heating our apartment efficiently and using less (preferably none) gas while doing it. You could totally go down this route too

We are looking into buying a heat pump and I am pumped (pun intended) for the optimization possible due to connection through HA. I will rewatch this exact video to get some tips and tricks for the new layout. Thanks a lot for sharing!

Great advices. Greetings from Argentina

Great video!

As I work shifts I have my heating follow my shifts in Google Calendar but with my girlfriend moving in I will have to look at it. Can you do a video on the scene thingy? I have lights turn on with a motion sensor but then I want the presence sensor to keep the lights on as they are set as only using the motion sensor they keep turning off. I think the scene thingy may help

Thanks!

Keeping your heating on is always less efficient. Look at the other side of your heating balance: energy loss, the loss increases when the temp difference between inside and outside increases. So when you turn off your heating at night, the temperature will drop, as a result the difference will be smaller just as the heat loss. When the day starts you measure the time your heater is running. But most heaters nowadays regulate their power-levels based on heating demand. So time is not the only factor, but the return temperature from the water as well. Once the temperature of the water is up, it takes only a little energy to keep it warm. But as the process is slow, that little energy is needed for a longer time. If your system is incidental heating with longer periods in between, your return water will be colder so your heater will burn on a higher setting. There are special timers for heating water pumps (at least in the Netherlands). So that way you only run the water system and not the heating. My air conditioning is able to run reverse, so I can use it as a heater. Especially handy on cold mornings when i want just a little heat until the sun kicks in. That way I don't need to heat up the whole system, and heating that way is very fast. Especially for people who go to work after breakfast, that can be a huge saver. I have a zigbee button next to my bed, so when I get up, I start the airco as a heater in winter, and by the time I'm downstairs, it is warm. Just as my coffee machine :)