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Controlling the heating of a multipurpose 3 story home

Posted: Mon Sep 26, 2016 10:25 pm
by dcb
Hi!
We have rented for our office and home a 3 story building and this year the owners have replaced the old boiler with a brand new Viesmann Vitodens 050, but without any kind of thermostat. Last winter I have simply used it by setting the output temperature on the boiler manually. I would like to avoid that this winter, it's rather annoying and inefficient, especially at the beginning and the end of the winter. After searching a lot of products I reached the conclusion that our use case is not an usual one, so I'm here asking your advice regarding the best setup for controlling the heating in our building.
Here are the constraints:
- the first 2 floors are used for the office; there are 8 rooms and lots of radiators and decent isolation.
- the last floor is where we live; there are 4 rooms and plenty of radiators, but unfortunately the isolation is horrible and also the piping was not properly designed and volume of hot water that gets there is smaller, compared to the first 2 floors.
- the piping for each floor is separated, I mean there is a point where it splits in 3, each branch going to a different floor.
- it seems that the Vitodens 050 has an issue with on/off thermostats and Viesmann recommends using OpenTherm ones (not 100% sure about the accuracy of this).
Ideally I would like to be able to control the temperature for each floor separately, with different schedules for each of them and with the possibility to access the settings remotely. From my research I've figured out that the solutions using radiator controllers are out of question because of the large number of radiators. Normally I wouldn't mind a solution with one thermostat, that I would eventually move from office floors to home floor as needed, but because of the isolation and piping – which I can't change – the first 2 floors tend to overheat, while the last one is colder. So, again ideally, I would have valves installed for the piping of each floor, with a central unit commanding them based on input from remote sensors.
But I could not find any "off-the-shelf" system to achieve this, if you know any I would really like to hear about it. I'm not afraid to build a custom setup either using an OpenTherm Gateway, but consider the fact that I'm a software guy so the hardware part needs to be simple.
Failing all that which of the existing solutions like nest, momit, evohome etc, would be best for my use case?

Thanks!

Re: Controlling the heating of a multipurpose 3 story home

Posted: Sat Oct 08, 2016 4:50 pm
by dcb
Well... I just ordered a nest. I'll let you know how it goes.

Re: Controlling the heating of a multipurpose 3 story home

Posted: Mon Jan 23, 2017 11:04 am
by spencermoseley
Hi dcb, what's the updates?