HouseHeat system

[jtuggey]

Hi. Been using the HouseHeat system for a year now, including BoilerConnect. The latter can be controlled by up to ten room controllers.
Hope that helps?
Has anybody had much joy with a frontend for the system? I've tried FHeM but got stuck with full buffers etc. Also tried ip-symcon but struggled with german translation, despite using google translate.

Jt

[Paul Williams]

Thanks JT
after a year of having the HouseHeat system what are your thoughts??? I am going to buy for the rest of my house from them ...the service I have received so far is excellent the plumber is coming next week to install the boiler connect...and now that they seem the cheapest on the market it would be wise to carry on...I saw the HouseHeat system on my greener home but was more expensive... they dont seem to be doing the PC connect as they dont rate it vey highly did you buy this for your system?

[HouseHeat]

The Househeat products are back in stock at My Greener Home.
We cannot match the Conrad prices, but we are selling the genuine Househeat product.
Thus far, we have chosen not to stock the Housemaster (FHZ1000) or the Boiler Connect. If we did would there be demand?

[Paul Williams]

I bought a Conrad window sensor and they are completely different from HouseTechs. The conrad ones are big and bulky the HouseHeat sensors are much smaller. The service I received was excellent from HouseTech and the product came very quickly.

I am sure there would be demand for the boiler connect however whn I phoned HouseTech I was told the HouseMaster was a bit of a gimmick and not worth it if I had an average size house. I liked the fact that they were honest and did not try and sell me any old thing. I am going to do the rest of my House shortly. I could not find connectors on the Conrad web site but HouseTech have a list of them. My advice is dont do Housemaster but stock boiler connect...window sensors are great too!

[Innes]

I agree with the last poster. I don't really see much value in the whole idea of programmable zones without the boiler interlock - you should definitely stock that if you can.

With it you can do away with a central timer/thermostat altogether, without it you have a hobbled system where the zones may want to operate when the central timer or thermostat are not calling (and hence the boiler isn't running). It also has the added benefit of allowing monitoring of when there is a heating call anywhere in the house (or at least, the FHT zones of the house) by broadcasting an FS20 on or off signal which can be monitored by a PC or other FS20 receiver.

[martynwendon]

I wasn't happy with needing to have a PC on all the time in order to run the FHZ 1300 PC interface along with FHEM and my xAP FHEM gateway so I managed to get it working on a SLUG (LinkSys NSLU2) running SLUGOS 5.3

There were some basic instructions on the FHEM web site but they were for an older version of FHEM and were based on Debian Linux (I prefer SLUGOS).

The result is a low power (around 10watts) 24/7 heating controller offering the FHEM web interface and xAP gateway.


If anybody is interested I can pull together my scribbled notes and post them?


Martyn

[Kevin]

Oooh - yes please Martyn - sounds really great :-)

Is the xAP support sufficiently complete to allow full HouseHeat control from any xAP enabled home automation application ? Remind me .. does it implement the BSC schema ?

cheers Kevin

Just for info.. these are all xAP enabled HA control applications

Cortex (Idratek)
MisterHouse
HomeSeer
HouseBot
xAP Floorplan
xAP Desktop
Charmed Quark (beta)
xLobby
Premise (?)
Girder

Barix Barionet (embedded controller)
OPN Max (embedded controller) Slug based
HomeVision (via xAP embedded gateway)

[martynwendon]

Oooh - yes please Martyn - sounds really great :-)

Is the xAP support sufficiently complete to allow full HouseHeat control from any xAP enabled home automation application ? Remind me .. does it implement the BSC schema ?

I knocked up a quick and dirty xAP gateway in perl that talks to FHEM, it's pretty basic but works ok - it implements BSC and gives endpoint addresses like:

ahs.fhem.ahsmediaserver:bedroomthree.state.desired-temp
ahs.fhem.ahsmediaserver:bedroomthree.state.measure d-temp
ahs.fhem.ahsmediaserver:bedroomthree.state.thu-from1

It sends .event each time something changes in FHEM and periodically .info (both abusing the text= and displaytext= parts of BSC).

.cmd and .query are also supported for changing and requesting current values.

It still needs further development, there's very little error or sanity checking and there's definitely better ways to implement some of the functions.....but I've been running with it since about July last year and it's pretty stable.....and since it "works", finishing it off has fallen down my to-do list!

It's downloadable at http://www.aceshigh.net/xap/FHEM.zip


I'll post again later with the FHEM->NSLU2 how-to once I've pulled my scribbled notes together into something more meaningful!


Martyn

[martynwendon]

I collated all my notes into a rough how-to, so anybody wishing to get FHEM and xAP FHEM running on a Linksys NSLU2 with an FHZ1300 USB pc controller can download them from http://www.aceshigh.net/xap/nslu2.txt

Any questions and I'll do my best to help!


Martyn

[HouseHeat]

My Greener Home took the forum's advice and now stocks the Boiler Connect:

http://www.mygreenerhome.co.uk/heat-...nnect-499.html