@Colin, here's the background.... I created this Node-RED panel using the dashboard nodes as an interface to the heating panel running from my Fibaro HC2. Within it I have added extra functionality that Fibaro does not offer out of the box e.g. schedule profiles (the section at the bottom), ability to control all zones at once for manual overrides etc
The panel works well, although I want to move it to uibuilder/VueJS as that's what I'm building on from now on. It's more flexible than the dashboard nodes and much more fun to develop with, however that does not mean I do not love the dashboard nodes, without them I would not be here writing this message. I am sure I would have given up with Node-RED if they were not there as diving straight into uibuilder was too much for me at first.
I have since then created a hot water flow with a VueJS interface using uibuilder:
You can read about it here, and see my code on github.
Now that I have the instant hot water flow working ie we have hot showers in the morning and instant hot water in the kitchen (at a MUCH more energy efficient setting than my plumber setup I might add),
I want to move onto moving away from using Fibaro's HC2 heating panel to entirely using Node-RED to run my heating. In fact, the engine for the hot water flow, which is about 200 lines of code, so quite small, is really a basic heating panel, so I know I can build the real mccoy (the real thing) now.
I'm thinking of the something like the following feature set for the heating panel:
Schedules/Manual Overrides/Holiday Mode
- multiple pre-configured schedules covering all zones in the house
- ability to manually override individual zones or all zones (plus maybe groups of zones)
- a holiday/vacation mode which can be set at the individual zone or across all zones
Zone Schedules & Heating Profiles
- preset ~6 different temp levels per room e.g. from OFF to BOOST
- a nice interface to mix and match temp levels in a room to a heating profile
- multiple pre-configured profiles for the entire house - a profile being a configuration of temp levels for every zone in the house
Interfaces
- one or two (as required) nice interfaces to control all of the above + a modified version of the panel that I have pasted an image of above i.e. the main user interface
More Heating Control Functionality
- a summer / winter override i.e. summer = all off, winter = heating on to user selected heating profile
- an automated profile selection function to take outside temp forecasts and determine the best profile to use e.g. if it gets hot > 16C on a given day, turn all the heating off, if there is a cold snap =, boost the heating
- room independent heating overrides based on the sun being out e.g. temp >10C + sun is shining today = turn heating off.... the reason for this last one is that I notice my kitchen (for example) gets too hot on cold days when it is sunny all day - admittedly that does not happen often in London
The above is a bit of a brain dump, I probably missed stuff off the list, but if you see it in the panel I pasted above, then it will be in the new solution.
Before I started I just wanted to see if anyone had done it before, otherwise as with every one of my projects I'll just get on with it and build something.
My aim for now is to build something that works off a large touchscreen panel, so you can see the whole house at once on one screen.
I'm not so sure if I need a mobile interface as if the above works, you shouldn't really have to change the temp in a room often... and I might just use Alexa/Google Home for short term (lazy) overrides, but if I do need a mobile interface I'll create something basic for manual overrides later, it shouldn't be too hard.
