- Oh!
It's awesome!
- That's so cool.
- We can tell exactly where they go.
One of the coolest things about my new house
is the heating system.
It takes hot water from this boiler
and pumps it through the floors,
using this bank of valves to decide
which rooms are going to get heating at any given time.
And compared to a traditional forced air system,
a hydronic one like this is more efficient
and it's completely silent,
but the cooling is another matter altogether.
This puppy right here,
who I nicknamed Bryant
is grody as heck, 25 years old,
and uses only a single temperature probe
on the inside of the house to determine
whether he turns on or not.
That means whoever's hanging out
in this north-facing bedroom, right next to the thermostat,
is having a pretty good time.
While people sitting in the living room
are going to need the fire to warm up.
Meanwhile, down in the land center,
with all these computers. (whines)
Now I could solve these problems by paying someone
to come and install an expensive multi-zone
air conditioning system,
but this is Linus (beep)ing Tech Tips.
So instead I'm going to be using a raspberry PI
and a handful of these super cool,
electronically-controlled dampers
that you can get online for, like, 150 bucks.
That's right. Fraction of the cost.
And it's going to be way better.
- [Jake] Probably not.
- But what is better is shopping with Honey.
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Before we can determine where to install
our cheap AC zone controls,
we need to know where the in-floor heating zones are,
because the last thing in the world we want
is for the AC to be fighting against the heat
with both of them running at the same time,
because the freaking zones don't line up.
So we're starting here, in the master bathroom,
where the plan is actually to eliminate
one of the in-floor heating zones.
You can see we've actually got easy access to show you guys
how these in-floor, radiant, heating tubes are coiled
around the room so that your toes are nice and toasty.
It's actually, apparently, pretty common
to have a separate in-floor heating zone
for the master bathroom,
because it's pretty typical for the flooring type to be
different in the bathroom compared to in the bedroom.
But Yvonne and I are going to be putting
the same type of flooring in these rooms.
So there's a couple of good reasons to consolidate.
Number one is that the thermostat for the bathroom
sits right here, next to the duct for the AC.
So it would be easy,
for that thermostat over on the other wall
to be calling for cool,
while this one is getting blasted with cold air,
calling for heat.
Number two is that implementing these AC zones
is inherently more expensive and complicated
than implementing these heating zones,
now that the tubes are already on the floor,
so we're saving ourselves some "complicatedness" there.
Fortunately, the builders did a great job
of labeling everything.
So I know exactly where all of these cooling loops run.
That means we can focus our attention
on how to turn that basic, single zone AC
into a multi zone one, and for that,
we will be using this, or something like it.
This is a Honeywell TrueZONE Damper.
And what it does is, it's basically,
just a piece of ducting that allows air to flow, or...
does not, depending on whether the room
is calling for cool or not.
To do that, it uses this 24 volt AC actuator,
which is designed to be used with Honeywell's own system,
but we found that it works just fine with anything you want.
I love how the readout is just mechanical.
So that's how we're going to do the main floor
and the upstairs.
But for the basement, we've got both,
more possibilities and some more challenges.
The original owners that didn't finish the entire basement.
So they only put two zones down here,
one for the bathroom and the rec room,
which is where we're standing.
These were the finished parts,
and the wall actually ended right here,
and a second zone for everything else.
But I'm gonna show you something cool.
Okay, let's go, quick! Before it fires.
Right here in the floor--
Oh, there it goes.
Just kicked in.
Right here on the floor,
we've got six loops for that "other zone".
And there are actually labels on these,
but they are completely illegible and mean nothing to me.
So what we're going to do,
is we're going to whip out the thermal camera
and we're going to do a trace with the hot water
that's circulating through the floor
to figure out whether we can segment out,
say, the land room and the theater room, for example,
which are rooms that could have
very different cooling requirements.
Yeah, it's going to take a while to heat up that water.
We might want to get some lunch.
You guys might have noticed a wild Jake
appearing in the background of the video today.
He's here to show us how this is going to work.
Hit me.
- [David] We told you. - Oh, I just showed up.
I didn't know I had to do stuff.
So once we actually get to the final install,
when Linus has his server rack going,
and his home server,
we'll just run Home Assistant
in a Docker container on his unright server.
But for now Raz PI is our stand-in.
- But assistant doesn't work by magic,
so, first things first,
we need to figure out how to close the damper.
And the answer is this 24 volt power supply.
Wow, it wasn't that convenient.
For our demonstration, I will be the lovely assistant,
plugging the AC power supply into the wall.
- Oh, did you already plug it in?
- Yeah, it's plugged in. - Oh, we're live wires.
Here, you want to see some sparks?
- No, no, no, no, no, not necessary.
- Oh, sparks! (yells)
- [Linus] Okay, there's like, kind of--
You're gassy.
- Can you unplug that actually?
- [Linus] Yes. - Now, when I went in
and actually picked this thing up,
we were going in totally blind.
I actually had no idea if this was just going to work.
This could have been some weird proprietary crap
that Honeywell requires you to, like, wire up
in a certain way, with a special power supply.
But, fortunately, it's just 24 volt AC.
So we plug it in,
and we plug it in,
and you plug it in. - Time for the big test.
Put your hand in there.
I'm not putting my hand in there.
- Okay, you be ready? - I'm ready.
- Oh, it's moving, isn't it? - Oh yeah.
- Nice.
- I think the closing time on this thing is 30 seconds.
- Okay.
- But-- - That makes sense,
you don't want to have, like,
a sudden shock to the system.
It flips closed and there's all this back pressure.
- Yeah, it's just like when you
shut your hose really fast,
you might hear a (thud), which is called water hammer.
So I guess this would be like "air hammer"?
- Air hammer?
Of course, we have to be able to--
I can't just stand here.
and go like this, to control the AC in my house.
Surely, we can do you're better than that.
- Well, I mean, we could,
we could hire a few Linus'.
And that's where this guy comes in.
Now, what we're going to use in the final install
is not necessarily going to look like this.
It's going to have a lot more channels,
but this is what we had laying around
and it's going to be perfect for our demo here.
This is what's known as a "smart relay board".
Basically, each one of these
is kind of like a light switch.
Rather than having a human, or a Linus,
in this instance, actuate it,
it has a wifi connection
that can actually actuate it, instead.
Just like clicking these buttons would.
And the nice part is,
we can integrate this directly into Home Assistant.
So Home Assistant can go,
"I want to open that damper."
Click that button, power goes through, opens that damper.
- It's been about 20 minutes. It's time--
Oh!
- [Jake] Oh! - [Linus] It's awesome!
This is fricking awesome. - It's so cool.
We can tell exactly where they go!
Oh my God, this is amazing!
- It's almost like it was made for this purpose.
- I love it.
So there it is.
We've got four lines into the theater room.
Two of them carrying hot water in,
two of them carrying cool water out.
So you can see there's this clear line
dividing the theater room lines from...
Go. Oh, here we go.
It goes out here.
So this room has four as well, then.
1, 2, 3, 4.
Oh, shoot.
I got prematurely--
I think my hopes are dashed.
Yeah, it's-- I think it's four lines.
I don't know what's going on.
I think they really did just kind of YOLO it.
The bad news is that the zones overlap.
- Yeah, yeah. - A fair bit.
The good news is, that it seems like,
for the theater room at least,
there's one coil that does most of the heating.
So, if you look here,
this boy comes in and actually crosses over
one of the other tubes at the end there.
You see that? - Yeah.
So it comes in, it comes down here,
and is actually, predominantly,
for this room that we're standing in.
Meanwhile,
this other one here,
this guy right here,
goes all the way along the whole floor.
So it's only that one edge of the room
that would get any heating from this room's zone.
So we could probably get away with it.
- Yeah. - 'cause it wouldn't
heat that room very much.
- And the main coil-- - I think it's...
negligible enough. And, plus, it would shut off
once this room is heated,
so I think it's okay. - Exactly.
Yeah.
- So now you just have to give this to the plumbing guys
and see if they can figure it out.
- Yeah. - Yeah.
- Nice!
- Good luck, plumbing guys.
- Did we show the wiring for this?
- [Jake] No, we didn't. - Okay. So, very simple.
Same 24 volt power supply,
well, transformer, really, 'cause it's AC to AC,
and then we're going into the actuator here.
The only difference is that
we've got our little wifi relay in the line.
You guys might actually remember this thing
from when I "smartefied" my garage door.
So, super straightforward,
Jake, through Home Assistant, press the button.
Beautiful.
You can see it activates here.
The damper opens. Freaking awesome.
Except these things, honestly, aren't that great.
I ended up breaking mine,
because it turns out there is
no hardware way to factory reset it.
You have to tell it through software to factory reset,
which is the stupidest thing ever,
because if you change your wifi, blah, blah, blah--
The point is, it's bricked. These things suck.
So we're going to be using a bigger one
that runs Tasmota firmware, which is way better.
- So, the reason we have this set up
to close by default when this is off,
it's just so, when we're like programming it,
Home Assistant, it makes a little more sense
for that relay to be "on" when it is doing air
and "off" when it is closed.
So it's "off", it's closing.
It's just like a brain logic thing.
- Yeah. - Because, regardless,
when this is closed, it uses power.
So, whatever.
- Of course, it's still a human pressing buttons.
We're getting to that.
Now, the most obvious substitute for a human finger
would be a thermostat,
but we've got a couple of problems.
- First and foremost,
having 10 thermostats control the same AC
doesn't really work.
And on top of that,
how is that going to control a damper?
- I mean, look at it.
This is some ancient technology.
It's kind of beautiful.
There's only two wires going to this thing,
which go to a 24 volt power supply,
back in the mechanical room,
that controls the valve for that particular heating zone.
So, what that means is,
basically, this physical-ass, freaking mercury,
either tips and completes the 24 volt circuit,
opening the valve,
or it doesn't touch the metal contact,
and the valve closes.
That's it.
Most smart thermostats, actually a lot of them,
don't even work on three wire,
let alone on two wire.
Screwdriver's not for sale in the store yet,
so buy a shirt, LTTstore.com.
Oh, that's awesome.
Thankfully, you guys were full of lots of good ideas
in the comments on my last video about the new house.
There were some really awful ideas, as well.
- Terrible ones.
- But there were some good ones.
One way we could tackle this is running more conductors,
but, unfortunately, that would require ripping up,
not just walls, but in some cases,
even flooring of the house, in order to do that.
That is not happening.
- There's 10 of these. - Yeah.
But there were some other ideas as well.
One, was to just run temperature sensors in the rooms
and then have everything controlled via Home Assistant.
The problem with that idea was that the wife and the kids
want a bit more of a user-friendly way of interfacing
with the heat and cooling controls in each room.
One suggestion we got, a bunch of times,
was to use a thermostat from someone like tekmar,
that just uses these for power,
and then communicates wirelessly back to what is,
kind of, the "real" thermostat,
back in the mechanical room
that has multiple wires for heating, fan, and AC.
The problem with that is then I'm buying
into someone's, like, stupid proprietary thing,
and I'm adding a bunch more complexity that,
honestly, isn't necessary.
Thank you for the suggestion, though.
That was not one of the stupid suggestions.
- And the solution, well,
it turns out it's a smart thermostat anyways.
What we actually ended up with
is an Ecobee3 Lite.
And this was almost totally by accident.
We have these installed at the office,
and I was just kind of checking it for reference.
It turns out these guys are HomeKit enabled,
which means we can have direct connection to them,
no cloud necessary, which was one of your pre-recs.
- That was a big thing for me.
I don't want to wait for a relay.
And if some stupid cloud service is down,
I don't want to not be able to control the (beep).
- Or have no AC at all, right? - Yeah.
- So you plug this guy in,
it's basically just got the two wires for power,
which right now is hooked up to this guy.
- Yeah. - But in the future,
will be directly wired through this existing wiring.
Plug it in,
turns right on.
Now the really nice thing about these ecobees, is,
notice we only have two wires connected,
but in here, it thinks it has six.
- We can just lie to it.
- You can literally go in and tell it,
"That wire's connected, that wire's connected,
that one's connected, that one's connected."
So this thing thinks it's directly connected to an AC,
directly connected to a fan,
and directly connected to a boiler.
But it's not at all.
This way, we get the full brain, sort of,
smart sensing, smart "run-up",
smart rundown of this thermostat.
And then we just take what it wants to do.
Like, say, it's too hot in here.
I want to cool off.
It's going to turn into cooling mode,
and then we can read that in Home Assistant.
Home Assistant is like,
"Whoa, this thing's in cooling mode now.
Let me turn on the AC and open that valve."
- Before we can do the big demo,
we need to do a couple of things,
starting with hooking up, well,
some of the multiple aspects
of the heating and cooling system.
So you can see we've got our AC zone 1.
That's our damper.
We've got our heat zone 1.
So that's going to hook up to the...
valve on the boiler.
We've got our AC power.
That's going to tell it to turn on the compressor.
And then of course we've got our fan power,
which is going to tell the air conditioner
to blow cool air around the house.
So, right now, for the purposes of our demo,
we've just got AC and fan.
Then, in Home Assistant,
Jake has been setting up automations,
which are effectively scripts
that allow all of these elements
to interact with each other,
because the last thing you want
is to kick on your fan and your compressor,
but then have your damper closed,
because then you're going to create
a bunch of back pressure,
potentially blowing up your air conditioner.
So, what we've done,
is we've made sure that as long as
one AC zone is calling for an open damper,
the AC power and the fan will go on,
and, if all of these are closed,
these will turn off.
So, this is it then.
Exactly how we want this to work,
with the thermostat on the wall,
someone could set a temperature hold, and then, okay.
At 11:30, when the normal rules take over,
normal scheduling, everything's just totally
transparent to the user, we end it.
And...
our AC should kick on.
Look at that!
The fan goes, the damper opens,
'cause remember, "on" is "off" for the damper, right?
So it's open and we're blowing.
And then if I say, "Okay, look,
I really don't need that much cooling
'cause I'm a hot boy."
Look at that.
It's fricking awesome.
Look at it go.
The application for stuff like this
is really exciting, and basically endless,
with just simple sensors that could be wall-powered
or even battery-powered, you can do almost anything.
You could sit down in your computer chair
and have a battery-powered pressure sensor
that turns on a freaking desk fan.
The way that I plan to use this
is really to amp up the efficiency in this place.
So every wall light switch
is going to have a motion sensor in it,
which means that I'm going to have occupancy awareness.
So the AC will never turn on in a room
that hasn't had anyone in it for the last,
let's say, 30 or 60 minutes, or something like that.
It'll pretty much pay for itself.
It'll just take a few years.
It's really exciting.
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If you guys enjoyed this video,
but you have no idea what the heck was going on.
Maybe check out part 1,
where I, kind of, show you guys around the new house
and talk about this and some of the other challenges
that we're going to be trying to solve
over the next few months.