Getting started

[Tinker449]

DZ looks very interesting! I live in a 120-plus year old house with over 5000 sq ft not including the unfinished (so far) basement.  It was originally 3 apartments but we have opened up doorways between former units (we call them wings) on the 1st and 2nd floors. Only the center of the house extends to a 3rd floor.

Each part of the house has its own heater (no A/C as yet, just ceiling fans). As you might imagine, adequately heating the first floor without broiling the 2nd and 3rd floor is nearly impossible. We’re in the middle of Ohio BTW, lots of temperature and humidity variations over the year, but actually sometimes we experience all 4 seasons in a week XD

I have read enough about zoning to know that it’s complicated with lots of factors and considerations, and the nature of how forced air heaters actually work vs how people perceive they work.

I’m a retired coder / systems person and a hands-on diyer across most all of the stuff you find in a house’s infrastructure.

Is there an overview of DZ somewhere from both a mechanical and digital perspective?

Thanks in advance!

[Vadim Tkachenko]

Hello Dave,

> DZ looks very interesting! I live in a 120-plus year old house with over 5000 sq ft not including the unfinished (so far) basement.

My commiserations, I used to live in a house built about 150 years
before and know how painful it can be. What's the construction, brick?
How are the inner non-bearing walls made, original plaster over plank
mesh, or were they already redone? Were the ducts for forced air put
in, or do you still have just the vent holes between the rooms and the
floors?

> It was originally 3 apartments but we have opened up doorways between former units (we call them wings) on the 1st and 2nd floors. Only the center of the house extends to a 3rd floor.
> Each part of the house has its own heater (no A/C as yet, just ceiling fans).

What kind of a heater - a furnace, or a boiler?

> As you might imagine, adequately heating the first floor without broiling the 2nd and 3rd floor is nearly impossible. We’re in the middle of Ohio BTW, lots of temperature and humidity variations over the year, but actually sometimes we experience all 4 seasons in a week XD

Commiserations again, I still remember experiencing the same, of sorts
- we had an inadequate furnace and had to use an ancient wood stove in
the basement to heat the house - it was quite an adventure. The LP gas
bill was around $600 in 2000 US dollars.

> I have read enough about zoning to know that it’s complicated with lots of factors and considerations, and the nature of how forced air heaters actually work vs how people perceive they work.

:)

> I’m a retired coder / systems person and a hands-on diyer across most all of the stuff you find in a house’s infrastructure.
> Is there an overview of DZ somewhere from both a mechanical and digital perspective?

Since I don't know where you started, let me point you here:
https://github.com/home-climate-control/dz/wiki

There is some bit rot here and there, in particular, Raspberry Pi is
not the best bang for the buck anymore, so building it on a regular
Linux box would be a better solution today. Then there's the choice
between these two branches:

https://github.com/home-climate-control/dz/tree/last-imperative-maintenance
- rock stable, but getting obsolete
https://github.com/home-climate-control/dz/tree/reactive - bleeding
edge with all the new features and integrations (economizer, Zigbee
and Z-Wave being particularly useful now that the spring is coming
fast), but is somewhat too bleeding at times

I'm finally working on making DZ available as a Docker image, should
be coming soon, that'll make the entry threshold somewhat lower.

I'd suggest (as usual; read the archives of this forum) getting the
sensor network deployed before you do anything else, you will start
getting the picture of what is *actually* going on in your house (it
is likely to be quite different from what you think it is) and giving
you ideas on where to go from there. I'd highly recommend to set up
InfluxDB and Grafana (unless you prefer Kibana or something else)
right away, anything less is not worth it with the amount of data
you'll be getting.

To save you a few clicks, if I were starting where you are today,
knowing what I know, I'd go with the Zigbee hub and sensors, here:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B09KXTCMSC/ SONOFF Zigbee 3.0 USB Dongle
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08BCJNDYQ/ SONOFF SNZB-02 ZigBee
Mini Indoor Temperature and Humidity Sensor

Getting a bit more involved, I'd go the ESPHome route - the sensor
above provides only temperature and humidity, but I've got a bunch of
other sensors running on the sensor field - VOC, CO2, illuminance,
each of them can and will be used to control what DZ is doing. I'd
also suggest installing this to make sense of your sensor data:
https://github.com/home-climate-control/esphome2influxdb - Docker
image coming up there shortly even before it'll be available for DZ,
and you can already build it locally (dev branch, about to be merged
into main).

Configuration is still more involved than it can be in 2023, so let me
know when you get the hardware, I'll help to tie things together.
Though, hopefully, there are enough configuration snippets around DZ
Wiki to get rolling.

Good luck, and don't hesitate to ask questions.

--vt