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ndh
Assisted Living
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Posted: Friday Aug 25th, 2006 10:26 am |
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I am planning a solar heating installation at home shortly and pondering whether Comfort can be 'involved'. I am aware of the German Resol controllers http://www.resol.de/en/english.shtml as being fairly defacto in this area.
I am looking for help and encouragement to go ahead and can then post the results as part of the HVAC application manual I am proposing. Ideally I would sit down and work it all out myself but with the new Cytech Europe business things are pretty hectic.
I suspect there are options that involve keeping a Resol and interfacing (DeltaSol ES has RS232) or completely replacing the logic in Comfort.
So any HVAC / Solar Gurus out there?
This raises the overall subject of Comfort being more involed in Energy Conservation / Management etc. so please post new topics as required.
Nigel
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garym999
Comfort Installers
| Joined: | Saturday Aug 19th, 2006 |
| Location: | United Kingdom |
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Posted: Monday Sep 11th, 2006 06:27 pm |
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We are tentivley looking at this too with one of our clients. My general thought process, is not involve systems for the sake of it. So on that basis I'm thinking it is far better to leave the solar control to the proper controller.
Anyway isnt it just supplementing the heating demand for the HW so what control does that specificaly require? I'm not sure other than replacing the timeswitch and acting as the user interface.
However this does bring us neatly to the general need for Comfort to have some form of analogue (enviroment) interface. The most obvoius of which is temperature measurement. But there are a raft of other sensors, windspeed (windchill, closing awnings etc.), rain sensors (closing windows) etc. We have been contemplating the devolpment of something like this since in got involve with Comfort.
I have been prompting Chui on this and I belive there is research in this aera which I'd love to be part of.
With a few temp sensors reporting to counters it opens up the world of heating control. I'm not keen of thermostats as these can only report one temp so if you wanted to have a setback when the property was unoccupied that would be another stat, starts getting to messy, let alone yet more cables.
Honeywell have 2 intresting products in Hometronic, a basic comfort look alike with very good heating control and CMZone with very good control again but running as an isolated system.
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ndh
Assisted Living
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Posted: Thursday Sep 21st, 2006 09:46 am |
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Hi Gary,
Agree with your comment on 'leaving things', but still pondering if Comfort could replace Resol. Resol has good visualisation feature but the general logic & load can't be beyond Comfort I would have thought.
Coming from the manufacturers 'side of the fence' I'm always looking for the next big thing!
Personally I am keen that we contribute to the energy management side more. It actually bothers me that there is all this technology & gadgetry going into homes increasing energy use dramatically:
In the UK home energy consumption doubled between 1972 & 2002 and it is predicted to double again but 2010...... Taken from an article in the Guardian on 3rd July 2006: 'Gadgets drive up household energy use' - I have not checked if it is still there: guardian.co.uk/climatechange
If I can get more responses to the general subject area I will gladly put together an Application Manual on the subject.
Anyone wanting to look at the Analog side of Comfort should look in the Action Manual at actions: 89;102;103;104;105;106; 107 & 136. The examples shown for many of these use an Analog scenario.
See also post about: Comfort - Theban Multi Zone Heating.
Nigel
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garym999
Comfort Installers
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Posted: Monday Sep 25th, 2006 02:28 pm |
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You are right Comfort should be capable but when you lump in developent time and interfacing gear it maybe better to stick with the manufactures kit. Not that I'm dismissing things as we are looking at this too, just playing devils advocate.
On the analogue side the issues for me are ones of scaling the inputs. Having an interface dropping real values into the counters would be far better. Take a light sensor as an example, reporting values in Lux. I can now use one level for outside lighting and another for internal. Temp sensors can be used to report exact figures etc. rather that having thermostats reporting fixed values.
Energy management is certainly something to be looking at and will win points as time goes on.
Interfacing via EIB, Cbus or Dynalite all offer options but require alot of additonal kit especially if it is just a few points of measurement are required.
The otherside of this is the amount of wiring needed for all this expansion. The internals of Comfort use proven RS485 bus why not look at placing the sensing nodes (PIRs, Smokes etc.) to such a bus?
The other aeras that I feel Comfort needs to update on is computer interfacing, USB, TCPIP, emailing, web gui's etc. Yes it is there but maybe it is time to revisit. Of course much of this work I guess is in development just that the others are begining to catch up.
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ndh
Assisted Living
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Posted: Monday Sep 25th, 2006 08:47 pm |
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Good dialogue Gary and subjects close to some of my thoughts. For example the Comfort voice is still a powerful feature, but in the age of prevalent connectivity a GUI on a phone, possibly makes a more useful interface, at least to some users.
As you touched on (with awnings) there is possibly more control applicability to passive solar.
Nigel
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tedvpt
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| Joined: | Thursday Oct 5th, 2006 |
| Location: | Ireland |
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Posted: Thursday Oct 5th, 2006 09:01 pm |
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Hello Nigel, Gary and all. I’m new to the forum (just joined today, however have been part of the comfort-technical group for a few years now). Anyway, Solar heating - an interesting topic. I have a solar heating system installed in my house. I installed it about two years ago and I must say it really does work. We have constant hot water from the months of March/April to about now start of Oct. You will of course have hot water during winter months also however the central heating system usually heats the water during these months anyway. We live in the south of Ireland so the weather is pretty much the same as the UK. I would agree with Gary in that you’re better off using a dedicated solar controller for the task in hand. I tinkered around for ages with all sorts of stuff to enhance the system and found that I really added no value to it. I did however place my own sensors into the solar collector and top and bottom of the water tank. I am recording these using Homeseer and MCSTemp and this gives a very good graphical view of what’s going on. See attached.
If I was to use comfort, I think I would use it to alarm if a condition went outside of a threshold. i.e. power goes down in the house and your out, the day is a very sunny day, the solar collector is venting steam and losing pressure. This you need to know about and Comfort would be good at that (battery backed up and interfaced to the phone)
Regards,
Ted
Attachment: Capture07-09-2005-14.45.1505-04-2006-23.53.28.jpg (Downloaded 43 times)
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garym999
Comfort Installers
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Posted: Friday Oct 6th, 2006 07:29 am |
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Nice work! And the way you see Comfort being involved is just as I would imagine, to add value, not to replace the core functionality.
Part of it, is just reliability. Use separate subsystems to provide the infrastructe, building blocks and comfort as part of the glue to bring them together.
As an aside I wonder how much extra capacity there is with a panel running in full sun? Cos once your hotwater is up to temp I guess all that collected heat is just not being used any more. Shame there is not a way to store it or use it in a different way.
Welcome to the forum by the way! Tis so much better than bohoo groups. Thanks for taking note of my comments Cytech.
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slychiu
Administrator
| Joined: | Saturday Apr 29th, 2006 |
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Posted: Friday Oct 6th, 2006 01:20 pm |
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Is there a "setback" setting for these solar heaters which can be controlled by a Time Program or when armed to Away or vacation mode? I suppose saving energy doesnt apply to solar heaters though
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slychiu
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Posted: Friday Oct 6th, 2006 01:22 pm |
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garym999 wrote:
Welcome to the forum by the way! Tis so much better than bohoo groups. Thanks for taking note of my comments Cytech.
One of the nice features is the ability to see attached images online, which you dont have in the "bohoo" group
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garym999
Comfort Installers
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Posted: Friday Oct 6th, 2006 01:59 pm |
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slychiu wrote: garym999 wrote:
Welcome to the forum by the way! Tis so much better than bohoo groups. Thanks for taking note of my comments Cytech.
One of the nice features is the ability to see attached images online, which you dont have in the "bohoo" group
Absolutley 
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ndh
Assisted Living
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Posted: Sunday Feb 18th, 2007 02:21 pm |
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I'm about to start my project ...... given my various commitments this wil be challenging.
So look for new topic over next few days - it will be 'warts and all' but I hope at the end it will provide some guidance on what to do (and not do).
Look forward to all your input.
Nigel
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