Re: Ultimate Central Heating Thermostat

["Patrick Lidstone" <patrick@xxxxxxx>]

--- In ukha_d@xxxxxxx, REB.Barnett@T... wrote:
> Winter is nearly here, and I have a spare 5 minutes, so I've
started on the
> spec for the house thermostat I've always wanted (no commercial
product I
> can afford does what I want). My requirements are moderately
sophisticated,
> and there's a chance what I want won't work, so if anyone has any
comments
> or experience to share I'd appreciate it.
>
> *Multi-zone via Dallas one wire temperature monitors

I've been mulling this over too, and have a cunning and devious plan,
my lord. Possibly.

Traditional thermostats are deployed primarily because they enable a
closed feedback loop, with the ability to change the set point, in
the absence of more intelligent control. Does a heating control
system actually need to emulate this feedback & is monitoring of the
temperature in each zone actually necessary?

- The thermal properties of the house do not change

- The thermal properties of the house will be influenced by: sunlight
hours, external temperature, wind, rain, and insulation effects of
snowfall (which is not really worth considering in central London).

- If you have zoned control of the heating system, it should be
possibly to build a relatively simple model which takes these
influences into account, and I would guess that you could get pretty
accurate climate control based on just external temperature. From a
user interface perspective all you would need to modify is the offset
applied to each zone to raise or lower the relative temperature (...a
bit of an over simplification, since it assumes zones are
independent, but probably close enough)

The benefit of this approach is that it saves all the hassle of
monitoring the temperature in each room. There's also scope for some
nice refinements: you could get fancy, and adjust the model based on
the three day weather forecast pulled off the net. Any thoughts? Is
there a glaring flaw in my plan that I've missed?

Patrick


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