I live in a house that was built in the late 80s and for the past few years I've been working on making it more efficient.
The underfloor heating system works great, but never had any thermostats nor actuators. As a result, temperature regulation of the individual circuits is entirely manual and approximate.
The boiler always maintains the water at a fixed temperature, as there is nothing toggling the heater on demand.
A Polytherm controller manages both the circulation pump (on/off) and the mixing valve (open/closed, modulated). It monitors the water temperature through a sensor attached to the pipe going up.
An ESP32 relay module was put in place of the analog clock that broke many years ago.
I was considering a DIY solution with (plenty of) relays until I found Homematic, which I promptly liked because they offer a no-cloud solution that keeps working reliably even when if the network is unstable or goes down. I spent several hours on researching what would be needed to revamp the heating system and I came up with the following list:
- 1 * HmIP-CCU3 (central unit)
- 1 * HmIP-WHS2 (powers the circulation pump, tells the boiler that heat is needed)
- 1 * HmIP-FALMOT-C12 (actuators controller)
- 9 * HmIP-VDMOT (one actuator per heating circuit)
- 4 * HmIP-WTH-2 (one thermostat per heating zone)
I'm pretty sure the hardware listed above should cover everything except for the mixing valve, which I'm honestly uncertain how I should deal with.
In theory if I set the boiler temperature correctly there should be (almost?) no need for the mixing valve to be actively regulated. Can I just keep it manual, perhaps with a temperature sensor to be used as a high temperature alarm?
I found a few pictures online of the full circulation pump + mixing valve block:
Thanks in advance!
