It's awesome. So cool. We can tell
exactly where they go. One of the coolest things about my new house is the
heating system. It takes hot water from this boiler and pumps it through the
floors using this bank of valves to
decide which rooms are going to get heating at any given time. And compared
to a traditional forced air system, a hydronulic one like this is more
efficient and it's completely silent. But the cooling is another matter
altogether. This puppy right here, who I nicknamed Bryant, is groy as heck, 25
years old, and uses only a single temperature probe on the inside of the
house to determine whether he turns on or not. That means whoever's hanging out
in this north facing bedroom right next to the thermostat is having a pretty
good time. Well, the people sitting in the living room are going to need the
fire to warm up. Meanwhile, down in the land center with all these computers,
Now, I could solve these problems by paying someone to come and install an
expensive multiszone air conditioning system, but this is line tech tips. So,
instead, I'm going to be using a Raspberry Pi and a handful of these
super cool electronically controlled dampers that you can get online for like
150 bucks. That's right, fraction of the cost and it's going to be way better.
Probably not.
Before we can determine where to install our cheap AC zone controls, we need to
know where the in flooror heating zones are. Because the last thing in the world
we want is for the AC to be fighting
against the heat with both of them running at the same time because the
freaking zones don't line up. So, we're starting here in the master bathroom
where the plan is actually to eliminate one of the in flooror heating zones. You
can see we've actually got easy access to show you guys how these in flooror
radiant heating tubes are coiled around the room so that your toes are nice and
toasty. It's actually apparently pretty common to have a separate in flooror
heating zone for the master bathroom because it's pretty typical for the
flooring type to be different in the bathroom compared to in the bedroom. But
Ivon and I are going to be putting the same type of flooring in these rooms. So, there's a couple of good reasons to
consolidate. Number one is that the thermostat for the bathroom sits right
here next to the duct for the AC. So, it would be easy for that thermostat over
on the other wall to be calling for cool, while this one is getting blasted
with cold air calling for heat. Number two is that implementing these AC zones
is inherently more expensive and complicated than implementing these
heating zones now that the tubes are already on the floor. So, we're saving
ourselves some complicatedness there.
Fortunately, the builders did a great job of labeling everything so I know
exactly where all of these cooling loops run. That means we can focus our
attention on how to turn that basic single zone AC into a multiszone one.
And for that, we will be using this or
something like it. This is a Honeywell Truezone damper. And what it does is
it's basically just a piece of ducting that allows air to flow or Da da da does
not depending on whether the room is calling for cool or not. To do that, it
uses this 24volt AC actuator, which is
designed to be used with Honeywell's own system, but we found that it works just
fine with anything you want. I love how the readout is just mechanical. So,
that's how we're going to do the main floor and the upstairs. But for the
basement, we've got both more possibilities and some more challenges.
The original owners didn't finish the entire basement. So, they only put two
zones down here. One for the bathroom and the wreck room, which is where we're
standing. These were the finished parts. And the wall actually ended right here.
And a second zone for everything else.
But I'm going to show you something cool. Okay, let's go quick before it
fires. Right here on the floor. Oh,
there it goes. Just kicked in. Uh right here on the floor, we've got six loops
for that other zone. And there are actually labels on these, but they are
completely illeible and mean nothing to
me. So, what we're going to do is we're going to whip out the thermal camera and
we're going to do a trace with the hot water that's circulating through the
floor to figure out whether we can segment out, say, the LAN room and the
theater room, for example, which are rooms that could have very different
cooling requirements. Yeah, it's going to take a while to heat up that water.
We might want to get some lunch. You guys might have noticed a wild Jake
appearing in the background of the video today. He's here to show us how this is
going to work. hit me. I told you. Oh, I I I just showed
up. I didn't know I had to do stuff. So, once we actually get to the final
install when Lionus has his server rack going and his home server, we'll just
run Home Assistant in a Docker container on his Unrated server. But for now,
Raspi is our standin. But Home Assistant doesn't work by magic. So, first things
first, we need to figure out how to close the damper. And the answer is this
24volt power supply. Wow. Wasn't that convenient. For our demonstration, I
will be the lovely assistant plugging the AC power supply into the wall. Oh,
did you already plug it in? Yeah, it's plugged in. Oh, we're live wires here. You want to see some sparks? No, no, no,
no, no, no. Not necessary. Sparks.
Okay. There's like kind of gas. Can you unplug that, actually? Yes. Now, when I
went in and actually picked this thing up, we were going in totally blind. I
actually had no idea if this was just going to work. This could have been some weird proprietary crap that Honeywell
requires you to like wire up in a certain way with a special power supply,
but fortunately it's just 24volt AC. So,
we plug it in and we plug it
in. And you plug it in. Time for the big test. Put your hand in there. I'm not
putting my hand in there. Okay. You ready? I'm ready. Oh, it's moving, isn't
it? Oh, yeah. Nice. I think the closing time on this
thing is 30 seconds. Okay. But that makes sense. You don't want to have like
a sudden shock to the system. It like flips closed and there's all this back
pressure. Yeah. Just like when you shut your hose really fast. You might hear a th which is called water hammer. So I
guess this would be like air hammer. Air hammer. Of course. Um we have to be able
to I can't just stand here and go like this to control the AC in my house.
Surely we can do better than that. Well, I mean we could we could hire a few
Linuses. And that's where this guy comes in. Now what we're going to use in the
final install is not necessarily going to look like this. It's going to have a lot more channels, but this is what we
had laying around, and it's going to be perfect for our demo here. This is what's known as a smart relay board.
Basically, each one of these is kind of like a light switch. Rather than having
a human or a Linus in this instance actuate it, it has a Wi-Fi connection
that can actually actuate it instead, just like clicking these buttons would.
And the nice part is we can integrate this directly into Home Assistant. So,
Home Assistant can go, I want to open that damper. Click that button. Power
goes through, opens that damper. It's been about 20 minutes. It's time.
It's awesome. This is freaking awesome. So
cool. We can tell exactly where they go.
Oh my god. This is amazing. It's almost like it was made for this purpose. I
love it. So, there it is. We've got four lines into the theater room. Two of them
carrying hot water in, two of them carrying cool water out. So, you can see
there's this clear line dividing the theater room lines from
Go. Oh, here we go. It goes out here. So, this room has four as well,
then. One, two, three, four. Oh, shoot.
I got prematurely. I think my hopes are dashed. Yeah, it's I think it's four
lines. I don't know what's going on. I think they really did just kind of yolo
it. The bad news is that the zones overlap a fair bit. Yeah. The good news
is that it seems like for the theater room at least, there's one coil that
does most of the heating. So, if you look here, this boy comes in and
actually crosses over one of the other tubes at the end there. You see that?
So, it comes in, it comes down here and
is actually predominantly for this room that we're standing in.
Meanwhile, this uh other one here, this
guy right here, goes all the way along
the whole floor. So, it's only that one edge of the room that would get any
heating from this room's zone. So, we
could probably get away with it. Yeah, cuz it wouldn't heat that room very
much. And the main coil negligible
enough. And plus, it would shut off once this room is heated. So, Exactly. I
think it's okay. Yeah. So now you just have to give this to the plumbing guys
and see if they can figure it out. Yeah. Yeah. Nice. Good luck plumbing guys. Did
we show the wiring for this? No, we didn't. Okay. So, very simple. Same
24volt power supply or well transformer really cuz it's AC to AC. And then we're
going into the actuator here. The only difference is that we've got our little
Wi-Fi relay in line. You guys might actually remember this thing from when I
smartified my garage door. So, super straightforward. Uh Jake through Home
Assistant. Press the button. Beautiful. You can see it activates here. The
damper opens. Freaking awesome. Except
these things honestly aren't that great. I ended up bricking mine because it
turns out there is no hardware way to factory reset it. You have to tell it
through software to factory reset, which is the stupidest thing ever because if
you change your Wi-Fi, blah blah blah. The point is it's bricked. These things
suck. So, we're going to be using a bigger one that runs Tasota firmware,
which is way better. So, the reason we have this set up to close by default
when this is off, it's just so when we're like programming it in Home Assistant, it makes a little more sense
for that relay to be on when it is doing
air and off when it is closed. So, it's
off, it's closing. Mhm. It's just like a brain logic thing. Yeah. Because
regardless, when this is closed, it uses power. So, whatever. Uh, of course, it's
still a human pressing buttons. We're getting to that now. Well, the most
obvious substitute for a human finger would be a thermostat, but we've got a
couple of problems. First and foremost, having 10 thermostats control the same
AC doesn't really work. And on top of that, how is that going to control a
damper? I mean, look at it. This is some ancient technology. It's It's kind of
beautiful. There's only two wires going to this thing which go to a 24volt power
supply back in the mechanical room that controls the valve for that particular
heating zone. So what that means is basically this physical ass freaking
mercury either tips and completes the
24vt circuit opening the valve or it
doesn't touch the metal contact and the valve closes. That's it. Most smart
thermostats, actually a lot of them don't even work on three wire, let alone
on two wire. Screwdriver is not for sale in the store yet. So, uh, buy a shirt,
ltstore.com. Oh, that's
awesome. Thankfully, you guys were full of lots of good ideas in the comments on
my last video about the new house. There were some really awful ideas as well,
terrible ones, but there were some good ones. One way we could tackle this is
running more conductors, but unfortunately that would require ripping
up not just walls, but in some cases even flooring of the house in order to
do that. That is not happening. There's 10 of these. Yeah. But there were some
other ideas as well. One was to just run temperature sensors in the rooms and
then have everything controlled via Home Assistant. The problem with that idea
was that the wife and the kids want a bit more of a userfriendly way of
interfacing with the heat and cooling controls in each room. One suggestion we
got a bunch of times was to use a thermostat from someone like Techar that
just uses these for power and then communicates wirelessly back to what is
kind of the the real thermostat back in the mechanical room that has multiple
wires for heating, fan, and AC. The
problem with that is then I'm buying into someone's like stupid proprietary
thing and I'm adding a bunch more complexity that honestly isn't
necessary. Thank you for the suggestion though. That was not one of the stupid
suggestions. And the solution? Well, turns out it's a smart thermostat.
Anyways, what we actually ended up with is an EcoB3 light. And this was almost
totally by accident. We have these installed at the office. And I was just
kind of checking it for reference. Turns out these guys are HomeKit enabled,
which means we can have direct connection to them. No cloud necessary, which was one of your prerexs. That was
a big thing for me. I don't want to wait for a relay. And if some stupid cloud
service is down, I don't want to not be able to control or have no AC at all.
Right. So, you plug this guy in. It's basically just got the two wires for power, which right now is hooked up to
this guy, but in the future will be directly wired through this existing
wiring. Plug it in. Turns right on. Now, the really nice
thing about these Eco Bees is notice we only have two wires connected. But in
here, it thinks it has six. We can just lie to it. You can literally go in and
tell it that wire is connected, that wire is connected, that one's connected, that one's connected. So, this thing
thinks it's directly connected to an AC, directly connected to a fan, and
directly connected to a boiler, but it's not at all. This way, we get the full
brain sort of smart sensing, smart runup, smart rundown of this thermostat,
and then we just take what it wants to do. Like, say it's too hot in here, I
want to cool off. It's going to turn into cooling mode and then we can read
that in Home Assistant. Home Assistant's like, "Whoa, this thing's in cooling
mode now. Let me turn on the AC and open that valve." Before we can do the big
demo, we need to do a couple of things. Starting with hooking up, well, some of
the multiple aspects of the heating and cooling system. So, you can see we've
got our AC zone one. That's our damper. We've got our heat zone one. So, that's
going to hook up to the valve on the boiler. We've got our
AC power. That's going to tell it to turn on the compressor. And then, of
course, we've got our fan power, which is going to tell the air conditioner to
blow cool air around the house. So, right now, for the purposes of our demo,
we've just got AC and fan. Then, in Home Assistant, Jake has been setting up
automations, which are effectively scripts that allow all of these elements
to interact with each other. Because the last thing you want is to kick on your
fan and your compressor, but then have your damper closed because then you're
going to create a bunch of back pressure potentially blowing up your air conditioner. So, what we've done is
we've made sure that as long as one AC
zone is calling for an open damper, the AC power and the fan will go on. And if
all of these are closed, these will turn off. So, this is it then. Exactly how we
want this to work with the thermostat on the wall. Someone could set a
temperature hold and then okay at 11:30
when the normal rules take over, normal scheduling, everything's just totally
transparent to the user. We end it
and our AC should kick on. Look at
that. The fan goes, the damper opens cuz
remember on is off for the damper, right? So it's open and we're blowing.
And then if I say, "Okay, look. I really don't need that much cooling cuz I'm a I'm a hot
boy. Look at that. It's freaking
awesome. Look at it go." The application
for stuff like this is really exciting and basically endless. With just simple
sensors that could be wallpowered or even battery powered, you could do
almost anything. You could sit down in your computer chair and have a
batterypowered pressure sensor that turns on a freaking desk fan. Uh, the
way that I plan to use this is really to amp up the efficiency in this place. So,
every wall light switch is going to have a motion sensor in it, which means that
I'm going to have occupancy awareness.
So, the AC will never turn on in a room that hasn't had anyone in it for the
last, let's say, 30 or 60 minutes or something like that. It'll pretty much
pay for itself. It'll just take a few years. It's really exciting. Almost as
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privacy.com/Linus. That's
privacy.com/lininus. If you guys enjoyed this video, but you have no idea what
the heck was going on, maybe check out part one where I kind of show you guys
around the new house and talk about this and some of the other challenges that
we're going to be trying to solve over the next few months.