We have a gas heating system in the basement, a fairly old one. In the living room there was a bimetal thermostat to control it and there were normal thermostats on the radiators.
I already had Comet Dect radiator thermostats from my old apartment, which I could control via the Fritzbox. These are replicas of the AVM Fritzdect 301 and I bought some Comet WiFi thermostats from Euronics so that I could control more radiators. I’ve written a separate post about the control, which wasn’t that easy.
I then replaced the bimetal thermostat with a Homematic IP HmIP-BWTH thermostat with a switching output to make the heating smart. The step was easy, once the Homematic environment is set up in Home Assistatnt, it’s pretty straightforward.
But then it started to get complicated.
I have two Comet Dect in the bathroom and one Comet Dect and two Comet WiFi thermostats in the living room. At first I tried to group the thermostats together, but that didn’t work well because the thermostats and radiators are very different. The necessary offset of the radiators alone was too different for me.
Then I found the Better Thermostat integration. It combines a room temperature sensor, window/door sensors, weather forecasts or an ambient temperature sensor to decide when to call for heat and automatically calibrates your thermostats to correct the inaccurate readings near the radiator. Sounds great, but…..
The Better Thermostat takes on a life of its own and adjusts itself, sometimes changing the thermostat’s set temperature every second.
So much for how it didn’t work.
I’ll describe my solution in the next post.