Smart Heating Follow-up

It's almost a month since I set up my 'smart' home heating solution. Read more here, but the brief summary is that I bought a Hive Receiver and Thermostat Mini pack, and a Zigbee adapter, then combined them with a small handful of open-source projects to make a home-grown smart heating solution. That makes it sound grander than it is - it's actually very simple and quite basic, but does everything I need it to do at the moment.

I've combined the flows that I set up in N8N with Apple's Shortcuts app, which allows me to turn the heating on and off on demand. I also have an automation set up in Shortcuts that activates the heating in the morning so we're all toasty getting ready for work and school.

It's all graphed in Grafana, so I can see what the temperature in our main living room is over time, and when the heating has come on or gone off. I haven't built the web interface that I mentioned in the previous post - I'm not sure if anyone other than me would be bothered to use it. I might build it anyway as an exercise.

It's probably too early to tell what impact, if any, this has had on our gas bill; the weather in Dublin has been mild up to now and at the weekend we like to light the fire in the living room, so we're not relying on the gas heating as much as we will when the mornings are colder. I'm guessing we'll see some savings; having the system come on and off for brief periods to maintain a set temperature has to be more cost-effective than running it for an hour at a time regardless of how warm the rooms are. Watch this space I suppose.