This winter, rather than using bottled gas for additional heating, we used electric heaters - this post talks a little about how we approached it, some issues we encountered and the result.
@ben I am curious about one item in your data (having been trying to do similar maths for possible heatpumps here). Your cheapest electricity is down as 0.08 per Kwh which actually puts the resistance heater about level with gas but surely your real lowest cost is 0.15 because you could export it to the grid for that and buy gas with the 15p you got back. Obviously not the green solution ?
@ben This Tuya cloud lockin is ridiculous, as is the 25000 upfront cost for better plans. I guess Tyya is mostly a reseller towards tiny chinese manufacturers???
When I switch over to electrical heating, I'd probably do it with a split AC that can also heat. They are basically heat pumps, so you use 1 kW of electric power and get 3.5 kW of heat energy. People in far more colder climates than Germany use them in the winter (e.g. in Finland), so good ones are even usable in winter. And they warm the air, so w.hen you turn them on, the effect in the room is immediate.
A german youtuber (Andreas Schmitz) made several videos on this, e.g. this one https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wB8rq-D9PAQ - he also checked if the warm air flow would be uncomfortable to him, which it was not.
Best of all: these split climate devices are controlled via infrared, which you can also operate from #HomeAssistant ... either with an ESP32 with IR LED or with some prebuilt 16 € device from Aliexpress.
@ben
Understandable if your funds are limited, but a mini-split heat pump for that one room would be a much more efficient use of your solar power, in terms of BTUs per watt. As a warm air device, it would also warm the room quickly. A side benefit is the ability to provide air conditioning.
@ben I try to avoid IoT stuff that relies on someone running cloud services (not always successfully). Buying Zigbee instead of wifi stuff seems a good bet - a quick Google tells me whether Zigbee2MQTT supports the device, then I can guarantee it can all be handled locally with Home Assistant. Bought a DECT based baby monitor for the same reason - it's guaranteed to all be local. In many ways a wifi baby monitor would have been more useful, but so hard to know if it will be local or cloud based.
@ben But, my car relies on VW's servers and a non-changable eSIM. EV charger relies on Ohme's servers and a non-changable eSIM - would love an entirely local EV charger, but I think Intelligent Octopus Go compatibility precludes that.
I have a wifi connected Bresser weather station and was disappointed to find no local API. It sends (limited) data to Weather Underground and you have to get Home Assistant to pull it from there instead of getting complete data directly from the unit.
@ben on the heating front, my office room thermostat died so I decided to try using Home Assistant to run the heating (zigbee temperature sensor and a zigbee relay to turn the boiler on/off). Pretty happy with the result - just need to find a more reliable temperature sensor because the Tuya one I have is crap (updates less frequent than I would like, occasionally stops sending updates, and seems to have poor zigbee range)
@steve@ben
For US$12 you can get a Govee temperature/humidity sensor with display that uses Bluetooth. It has remarkably good range, and updates as often as every 5 seconds, running on 2 AAA batteries. It is well supported by Home Assistant.
@RealGene@ben I'd prefer zigbee. However, my Tuya zigbee temperature sensors were bought on the recommendation of a blog article where a bunch of sensors had been tested and that one produced frequent updates and good range. So either the article was wrong, or the hardware/firmware has changed. So pretty difficult to figure out which sensors are good if the manufacturer is going to update them to be worse without notice :(
@ben@RealGene I have:
2x Tuya TS0001 relays - works ok but range seems poor.
Tuya TS0601 soil temperature sensor - works ok, but a shame it doesn't report fractions of a degree.
2x Tuya RSH-HS06_1 temperature sensors - seem ok.
2x Tuya TS0201 temperature sensors - no way to increase update frequency, range poor, occasionally stops sending updates, 1 of them barely works (difficult to pair, sends updates for a short time after pairing and then stops).
Tuya PJ-1203A power monitor - poor range.
@ben@RealGene
2x Tuya BSD29_1 smart plug - excellent range, seems to work well. Slightly concerned that a UK 13A plug/socket form factor is rated at 16A though (and there is version claiming to be 20A!). The plug overlaps the power switch on some sockets.
Ikea Tradfri LED2035G10 light bulb - excellent range, seems to work well, if a little fiddly to pair.
The variation of zigbee range of the Tuya devices is weird - most of them seem to be poor, but then the smart plugs are absolutely excellent
@ben@RealGene The smart plugs are physically much bigger than the other devices, so maybe there's more room for a better antenna? But then Ikea seem to have managed to cram a perfectly good antenna into the smart bulb.
@ben we’re adding heat pumps at the end of the week for the same reason. Do you have any experience with them or are you using straight resistance heaters?
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