Hydronic Heat control for New Build

[ldragon99]

Hey Guys, I have looked through the forums for my answer but the posts I find are older. I know there is allot of new teck out recently and want to make my build as HS friendly as I can. I have pex run through the slab in the basement and transfer plates and pex throughout the rest of the house. I am designing the system with about 6 -8 zones right now and want to know what the best way to integrate control with HS? What are others using. I see some great zone controllers by Taco and the zwave thermostats work great. Is anyone doing something different?

[Dweber85rc]

I have a taco zone controller for my radiant system and am using aprilaire 8810 thermostats. The aprilaire plugin for homeseer is IP based rather than z wave and works well. I would also recommend installing thermowells in the lines for z-wave temp sensors for the water temp as an added way to be able to monitor the system.

[ldragon99]

Thanks for the info Dwrber. What are you using as your temp sensor in the Thermowells. I like the idea

[Dweber85rc]

It is a ds18b20 temperature probe wired into a fibaro door sensor. It's nice to know if the temp drops which is an indication of the pump going out or some other issue before the temp of the slab drops too much. Slabs retain heat for a long time and the room temp from just the thermostat won't be a good indicator of the potential problem until it could be too late.

[ldragon99]

A temp sensor wired into a Door Sensor? How does that work?

[Dweber85rc]

The door sensor has contacts you can plug the probe into

[ldragon99]

really, and it transmits temperature?

[ldragon99]

I just found the ones you were referring to. That is cool. I did not know that existed.

[Dweber85rc]

I believe there are others that can do that too but the fibaro ones I have work well and are relatively inexpensive. Cheap insurance. Especially if I find out about an issue before something freezes up.

[Atticka]

I'm working on a similar project with hydronic heating, for the zone control I'm going to use the virtual thermostat (SDJ-Vstat) to control the various zones (I have a total of four zones), and the valves controlled via RaspberyIO and a relay board.

I also have a heat pump that I've opted to use an Ecobee3 Lite and a room sensor located in each zone for my temp readings. I'm in the middle of setting up the Ecobee plugin but having a few hiccups.

Ultimately this should give me control of both my forced air heat pump (heat\aux\AC) and oil fired hydronic baseboards.

[randy]

I wrote about my system in 2014 here. It remains essentially the same 5 years later. I have changed thermostats since then to GoControl Z-Wave, but the logic of control is virtually unchanged. I have done some tweaking of my Events to improve on the number of burner short cycles and boiler heat recovery from heating domestic hot water in the summertime. The system has been completely reliable, the house very comfortable and it continues to function even without HomeSeer running. Our energy use for heat and hot water was reduced about 10-15% when using HomeSeer to control it.

Our Vaillant cast iron boiler is about 20 years old, we have a passive 40 gallon domestic hot water tank, 8 heating zones and a hot water zone. Our system uses Hayden heat exchangers rather than PEX in the floors. When the boiler dies we will replace it with one of the newer condensing boilers and gain some more efficiency.