HA beginner: CH controls - where do I start?!

["simon_haslam" <simon_haslam@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello

I'm specifying a gas/solar central heating system. It is an old house so,
although the wall insulation will be improved, I will still have radiators
and probably two UFH (bathrooms) zones. The house is sometimes partially
occupied during the day so I am keen to build in intelligent controls, so
that for example, a home office could be heated on its own during the day.

I found those Sauter 24V TRV head replacements. As part of the renocation
the house could be replumbed to have two or three zones and those valves
(and CAT5 or T+E) on each rad.

What I've found most domestic CH controls aren't really geared up to many
zone programming. Then I stumbled into HA...

The only HA-like stuff I have now is a LinkStation Pro LS-XHL NAS which has
been "opened" to run NFS and SqueezeCenter. It's quick (1.2GHz I
think) and fairly low power (~10W when idle) and could easily run another
webserver.

I can see there are a number of competing products but have been getting
swamped! Idratek seemed an interesting starting point but I don't want
anything that needs a Windows PC running 24/7.

I suppose what would be ideal would be:
* a unit that I could wire the rad/zone valves and boiler to (which
probably will be OpenTherm compatible), and that had an ethernet
connection,
* a 1-wire system controller, again ethernet connected (which I've seen),
that has thermometers in each/key rooms,
* some (Linux) software that ran all the time on the LinkStation and could
control components.

Then I could just use a browser to interact with the heating, perhaps even
have something like an O2 Joggler as an HA panel in the hall.

Of course once the HA infrastructure were there I might like to do more
later, but at the moment the purpose is just to create a more efficient
heating system.

Any thoughts? Hope this isn't a lame question - I've had a look through the
forums and am happy to do the research, but there's a lot out of there so
would like to rule out systems that are too complex...

Thanks!


Simon



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