Friday, September 03, 2010

Monitoring your Heating System

A couple of months back, I had some ideas about Smarter Heating Controls - with the weather turning Autumnal, it's time to start thinking about these ideas again.

Here are a few tips and gizmos to help you put together a DIY boiler and heating monitor

Pipe Clip Thermistor Temperature sensors from Rapid Electronics

The Arduino code needed to linearise a thermistor and display it in degerees C

Wireless actuators for thermostatic radiator valves from Conrad Electronics

Low-cost pulse output water flow meter froom SeeedStudio Depot - these are otherwise stupidly expensive in the UK. Easily read using a pulse input on the Arduino.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

The water flow meter from Seeed is nice, but as it is only rated up to 30 liter/min the use cases a somewhat limited.

Haven't found a higher capacity one at a decent price, unfortunately. Would for example be nice to monitor the Main incoming water pipe, but then 30 l/min won't do it.

Jack Kelly said...

Ooohhh.. it looks like JeeLabs have done some work on FS20... I wonder if we could use a Nanode as an Internet-enabled FS20 control hub?!

Noel said...

I have come to the same conclusion about water flow meters. I have been trying to make a BTU meter for an air source heat pump. They seem to have too low a maximum capacity or are too expensive ! However, assuming streamlined flow, is it not possible to increase the maximum flow by providing a physical shunt ? This is analogous to a resistive shunt in an ammeter but using a piece of pipe in parallel with a sensor ? It could perhaps be 'trimmed' using some sort of valve / screw. Your thoughts ? Noel