remote control of a central heating system - possible?

[Chris]

I'm about to install a new central heating system.

What I would really like to be able to do, is to phone home and switch on the heating. I work irregular hours, so programming the timer doesn't do it for me. I guess what I need is a way of linking the heating programmer to either my BT line, or a mobile.

Does anyone know of such a system? I have searched, but so far without success.

Many thanks for any help.

Chris

[Dave Plowman (News)]

TLC appear to have something that would do this via text from a mobile.

Infinite-Wireless

Costs, though.

[Andy Hall]

have a variety of products that should be able to do this in one way or another.....

.andy

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[Andrew Gabriel]

I have mine under the control of a Comfort alarm system, which allows me to phone it to switch it on and off, and it will phone me if it locks-out (not happened yet, except when deliberately engineered). There are also some timed programs, e.g. for doing the hot water cylinder for half an hour per day, but as it's part of the alarm, it has the intelligence not to bother if I'm away. Also, when the alarm is switched to night mode, the downstairs zone automatically falls back to a setback temperature setting.

I also have a PC interfacing to the alarm, and this enables me to switch heating and hot water on and off from work across the internet.

[Owain]

"Chris" wrote | I'm about to install a new central heating system. | What I would really like to be able to do, is to phone home | and switch on the heating. I work irregular hours, so | programming the timer doesn't do it for me. I guess what | I need is a way of linking the heating programmer to either | my BT line, or a mobile.

If you can find a stockist of velleman kits

Velleman K6502 Thermostat with remote control via the phone line - VY39N Velleman K2650 Call Code Activated Switch - VE86T Velleman K6501 Remote Control By Telephone - VY04E

The maplin codes given above all report "discontinued"

Most of these will require the phone line to themselves (no answering machine or fax dealing with incoming calls)

If you have broadband, an embedded HTTP webcontroller would be the elegant way.

Owain

[Mike Harrison]

ISTR seeing some sort of phone activated 13A socket switch in Maplin not too long ago.

[Paul King]

Some further information on this would be appreciated. Link?

This too please. Name of manufacturer/software. Link?

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[Andrew Gabriel]

The alarm/home automation system is Comfort,

have a number of schemes for interfacing to heating systems, but I'm simply using Comforts outputs to drive relays in place of the heating controller. The Comfort system is extremely progammable to do whatever you want, but this flexibility does mean you are going to need some experience in programming, although it probably doesn't matter in what (e.g. excel spreadsheet, mail merge, or similar is probably enough -- you don't need to be a low level assembly language programmer).

The software is written by me, but it's not a product and is somewhat specific to the house setup it runs in, the Comfort alarm system, and the type of temperature sensors I use (more so than would be appropriate for a product). I run it on an old PC under Solaris x86, but it would easily port to any other unix system.

I've done two installations now. The first one, the PC can switch the heating and hot water on and off, but system uses the existing thermostats for controlling call for heat from the boiler. However, all the timed on/off and most of the manual on/off is handled by the alarm system. The PC only normally handles remote access across the internet, and the system continues working fine if the PC should happen to be switched off.

With the second installation I took this further and the PC actually handles the temperature monitoring and decides when to call for heat from the boiler, based on the actual and desired temperature settings. The desired temperature settings are read from conventional looking room stats (which aren't really roomstats at all, but potentiometers from which the PC can read the position). The PC can decide if it is going to use these pseudo roomstats, or if it is going to use some other target temperature setting such as frost protection or setback. This decision can be based on the house occupancy and/or instructions given to it remotely (across the internet or over the phone). I'm in the process of enhancing it so the PC can set the boiler temperature, to make more optimum use of the condensing boiler.

In this second setup, the PC is vital to the operation of the system (if it died, house could get frozen/burst pipes for example). The alarm system operates a heartbeat check on the software running in the PC every hour, and generates an alarm if it stops working (which will phone out, not the full sirens and lights;-). Similarly, it will generate an alarm if the boiler reports lockout. Fortunately, this has never happened to date, but the alarm system can reboot the PC by power cycling it if it ever needed to, and again that can be commanded remotely over the phone, or if the PC is still working well enough, across the internet.

I don't know of an off-the-shelf solution which would do all this, and if there was one, I probably couldn't afford it. However, this is a DIY newsgroup;-)

[Paul King]

Andrew,

Thanks for the information - most helpful.

I'm a hardware and software engineer (programming in Microsoft "C" mainly)

I'll take a look at the Comfort system. The custom stuff you have done for yourself ought to be marketable - ever thought of it?

[Andrew Gabriel]

Yes, but I have to invent the 48 hour day first ;-)