Hi from Mike

Hi, I just stumbled across BMS Link while looking to see what was available for home heating control. I am not certain if this is what I need, as I have not yet gleaned much from this site. Maybe I have missed some important overview somewhere.

I have 4 storage heaters, and my initial plan was to automate the charging of the heaters (biggest is 3.6 KW) using contactors controlled by a Raspeberry Pi which is on my home network. The heaters each have a manual charging rate (input) control to heat up to a preset internal temperature. The higher the input, the more heat output is available over a period of a day or so. However, these need constant tweaking as the weather changes, and ideally need to anticipate the weather (by about 2-3 days). Hence the need for computer control. Even the latest storage heaters do not anticipate weather as far as I know. I plan to control the charging by setting the input controls to max, and then using an algorithm based on weather sites (met office?) to control the charging time using the contactors. This is also connected to a cheap rate supply, so the system will only be active for certain times during a 24 hour cycle.

Looking at the Lightwave stuff, they don't seem to have anything that can switch 3.6 KW hence my idea to use contactors. However, I have not found anything to automate contactors, so will need to do this myself. However, if there is a chance of using reasonably priced off-the-shelf hardware and software like BMS Link I am all for making my life easier. Any ideas would be welcome.

Hi Mike and welcome to the site.

I'm an electrician/electrical engineer by trade and I'd always use a contactor for switching loads such as you've outlined.

Using the automation features of scada (which is what the graphical portion of bmslink is), you should have no problems designing a solution.

Once you have inputs (such as temps, time of day and other factors) and a means of control (i.e. RF relays), you can go as far as you like.

I wouldn't go down the LWRF route personally, you want to get a RaZberry GPIO board for your PI and use z-way-server, which is supported by the system.

Incidentally, I'm just in the process of writing the new system, which seperates the core from the scada.

Part of that means the core has its own web interface (which i'm currently porting to angular/bootstrap).

Thanks for getting back to me quickly. I am going to need to do a lot of reading to catch up on your system and the Z-wave stuff. Anything you can recommend to get me up to speed would be appreciated. I expect I will need to upgrade my Pi software as I set it up over 2 years ago and haven't used it in that time.

Hi Mike,

I wouldn't worry to much at the moment, wait for the new release

However, none of this stop's you getting to grips with z-way server and Z-Wave.

You can update your RPI and install z-way server yourself, or use the IMG for the PI itself to get you running.

For our purposes, we only need the 'expert' section to configure the controller/network and nodes.

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Thanks.