Planet Arduino

While almost everyone has a heater of some sort in their home, it’s fairly unlikely that the heat provided by a central heating system such as a furnace is distributed in an efficient way. There’s little reason to heat bedrooms during the day, or a kitchen during the night, but heating systems tend to heat whole living space regardless of the time of day or the amount of use. You can solve this problem, like most problems, with an Arduino.

[Karl]’s build uses a series of radiator valves to control when each room gets heat from a boiler. The valves, with a temperature monitor at each valve, are tied into a central Arduino Mega using alarm wiring. By knowing the time of day and the desired temperature in each room, the Arduino can control when heat is applied to each room and when it is shut off, presumably making the entire system much more efficient. It also has control over the circulating pump and some of the other boiler equipment.

Presumably this type of system could be adapted to a system which uses a furnace and an air handler as well, although it is not quite as straightforward to close vents off using a central unit like this as it is to work with a boiler like [Karl] has. With careful design, though, it could be done. Besides replacing thermostats, we can’t say we’ve ever seen this done before.

Thanks to [SMS] for the tip!

This week I’m going to introduce George Koulouris who loves playing, testing, making with others  especially at the ‘Petit Fablab de Paris’ where he thinks is a  great place to do exactly that!  He’s been experimenting with the Arduino Yún focusing on his main interest: the integration of technology to everyday objects. The following post was originally posted on his blog.  Read  other guest posts on Arduino Yún.

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The Motivation
I have two small problems in my house. An ever-increasing electricity consumption bill and a girlfriend which likes to take hot baths at unpredictable times during the day.

Until recently, we left our water heater switched on, 24/7. But then we took a look at our electricity counter readings. Needless to say, we switched it off immediately! An old water heater can indeed make the electricity counter wheel spin fast, very fast…!

So we started switching it on and off whenever we needed to take a bath. The problem was that we weren’t always at home and the water took almost an hour to heat-up! So I decided to connect it to the internet!

The Configuration

The SmartBoiler is contained in a small box and placed on top of the house’s main electricity board. A mechanical arm extends out of the box. Its bottom end is clipped to the heater’s switch whereas its top end is attached to a motor in the SmartBoiler.

The arm can be displaced vertically.

The box contains a motor and an Arduino Yún. The latter checks, at regular time intervals, a .txt file on a web-server to see whether me (or my girlfriend!) have turned on the heater. If yes, it launches the motor and the switch is turned on!

The user interface is a simple website. You can view it here.

Do it Yourself

To do this project you need 5 things:

• A web-server hosting service
• An arduino Yun
• A servo motor (I chose the Towerpro MG995)
• A laser cutter (or excellent wood-crafting skills!)
• A bit of mdf

Then you can

• Download the laser cutter files
• Find all the code (documented of course!) in my github repository
• Check the dimensions of the mechanical parts in Thingiverse

Check out the images

What next?
Although I created this to control my water heater, this project can be used to control any mechanical switch. Simply dimension the box correctly and you can control everything via the internet. Your lights, your house’s main electricity switch… Hell, the possibilities are limitless!