home automation

Over Christmas, I installed a small PLC panel at my parents' house to control several things that needed automating.

They have a whole-house water filter that needs back flushing once per week (well water with lots of sediment). Manually doing it was always forgotten until sediment built up on the filter screen and water pressure began to drop.

They also have a small pump on the hot water main in the basement that circulates hot water from the water heater out to the far end of the house to cut down on water usage / wait time for hot water. It used to be on a timer, but we could never get the ON times right. Now, it's on-demand with pushbuttons in the bathrooms and kitchen, and runs the pump for five minutes. They may want me to add pre-defined ON times back in later.

They also have some other things they want controlled (temp controlled attic fans, etc...), and adding to the panel in the future will be easy.

I really liked using the Click for this little project. I tried it a few years ago (shortly after release) and I found the software wanting. It's matured nicely and was a snap to program.

The whole panel is 24VDC and all the field wiring is 18-2 CL3 in-wall rated speaker cable.

I like using what I know to help family. I was told that if they ever sell the house, I should offer a tech support contract


-rpoet

Looks good, I would just say that having a non-standard (for home use) control device is enough to put off a section of people touching it. Some will be oblivious to care and others like me would jump on it, but to the more financially minded people those sort of things are enough to put them away from buying.

Nice!

You can also get a 120v click for projects like this.

Looks good

You could install a little HMI now for users...

dowthebow said:

You could install a little HMI now for users...

Click to expand...

For my home automation system I bought a Windows10 tablet and put AdvancedHMI on it. It talks to 3 SLC's, soon to be 4, and 2 Christmas SLC's when they are running.

If it wasn't for the power plug on the tablet coming off the side I would like to mount it in a frame on the wall, maybe more than one around the house, but a frame that would hide to cord and plug would be too big.

My dream is to implement something similar once I become a homeowner. However, I'm not sure how such a system would be seen from an "outside" perspective. It seems like the "automation" factor should increase the value of the house if implemented properly, but as others have mentioned it may scare buyers if the system is not documented, has no "legitimate" company backing, etc.

I have found the reception to my system is well taken. But, that was after I rewired it from the prototype with a lot of wires showing to a more professional looking installation.

Most people only look at the HMI features, a few want to see what is doing the work - but once they see a PLC they don't understand, it's back to the cool HMI.

For peoples scared of technology, you could just add a manual selector switch to override each plc logic loop on the door.

I have one also from old stuff, i was very happy to install it back then but...at the end, i have not much device to control with it...
I have some temperature probes, current load monitoring and some outside door switch connected but it is more a toy than something very useful.
i was thinking about installing a control cylinder on my wood stove air trap but never had time to make it...

You don't seem to have much protecting fuses installed? Have you made sure everything is safe against fire or won't scare your insurances company ?

Nice! I need to do something similar for my water well and strainer to auto purge it.

Jeff brings up a good point about the circuit protection. It would probably be pretty easy to replace some terminal blocks with fused terminals.

For what it's worth, My brother-in-law does home inspections for prospective house buyers. He'd red flag a custom control system as a 'custom control system', not likely to be maintained or repaired by the heating and cooling businesses listed in the local yellow pages.

Exactly, don't do this to increase your house value. Only if you enjoy making and maintaining it yourself. Good practice would be to wire it in such a way that it is easily modified back into a standard situation.


Also keep in mind that things develop quickly in this field. What we find very cool today as the "latest and greatest" may be regarded as outdated in the early twenties.

I am enjoying these threads on home automation because I have been rolling this around for awhile in my mind, the pros and cons. I do want a system that is completely inhouse and does not reach out to remote servers etc.

I am thinking of possibly going with z-wave or some other wireless setup so that I can return the place back to original without alot of work and also it would make install easier. But I haven't done a whole lot of research yet on what I would use.

Our house has a oil furnace and a heat pump/ac unit. I would like to build controls to make it automatically switch from the heat pump to the oil furnace depending on the outside temperature, to get maximum efficiency. Then it would also switch to AC when required to meet the thermostat setpoint.

I was also planning to add a remote plc in my garage with a serial cable buried below the grass but i found it easier to use wifi switch to control my outdoor lights and a heating cable for my water drain. I'm limited to the cell phone app but it is not bad for 20-25$ each...
If you have links to some devices that can be controlled with a plc across a wifi network at cheap price, i would be interested to see them...

What I use for remote control, where I don't have network cabling, is a small SLC rack and a NET-ENI on a WiFi range extender. The range extenders aren't too much, but I lucked out finding some NET-ENI's I didn't have to pay for on a retrofit project.

I am thinking about RIO since I have a scanner and an adapter. I would have to run the bluehose through a conduit though - I don't think they make direct burial bluehose.