How to turn an apartment into a smart home: personal experience

Smart home is the dream of many. This is a great convenience - to remotely control home systems: you don't have to worry about the turned on and left iron or light; heating operation. But each owner approaches the arrangement of automation systems in his own way and this experience is interesting. Participant FORUMHOUSE under the nickname master20ekb told how he equipped his house with smart systems.

How did I come to this?

Due to the duty of my work, I have been doing automation for a long time. Of course, I heard about a smart home, but the opinion was this - all this is for the lazy. So, how my opinion has changed.

At one of the facilities, I made a notification system via GSM, where the BM 8039D controller was included in the project. In the process of work, I really liked its functionality and convenience, and the price for it was very tempting - only 10 thousand rubles. rubles. Here I came up with an idea - why not try to build something on this controller.

The idea of ​​a smart home using my technology

First of all, I asked myself: what do I want to manage in my apartment? First, the most common are lights and electrical appliances that I may forget to turn off. I often forgot to turn off the light in the hallway when I left for work, and as soon as my wife woke up, I received not very good SMS, with a hint of my memory.

Secondly, it is, of course, underfloor heating and heating control. It was decided to control the underfloor heating by a temperature sensor, and solenoid valves and temperature sensors were also installed on each battery. Why was it done? So that we can control the heating of each room separately, moreover, one of which was empty for us. It did not need to be heated, but only to maintain the temperature in the radiator and pipes so that they did not freeze.

In third place was the control over the state of the gas leak. Since I live in a multi-storey building, we cut off the general heating and hung up a gas boiler, but it was simple, without automation. In addition to the gas sensor, I installed a valve on the gas inlet to the apartment. In the event of a possible leak, the valve will shut off the gas supply.

What else? Security, of course! This is a bedroom volume sensor, a door opening sensor. It would also be possible to install a glass break sensor, but I live on the 4th floor, so there is no need for it.

Project implementation

So, with the choice of functions, I decided, what next? Work began on assembling the panel, where I installed the controller itself, a battery for the controller to work during the period when the light was turned off, an overload protection circuit breaker. He took up quite a bit of space. Then I started installing the valves and sensors. It was fast, although I ran more shopping.

As a result, everything was assembled, and work on connection began. First of all, I separated the outlet groups for the refrigerator and the transformer, which powers the ignition of the gas boiler, in order to prevent accidental shutdown in automatic mode. Then, for each room, I set up lighting groups so that I could control the light separately, and I extended the wiring for the valves and sensors. The valves were controlled by a voltage of 220 volts - I chose specially such so as not to put intermediate relays at 12 or 24 volts.

Why is this not quite a full-fledged smart home?

The work was done, and I got a semblance of a smart home. Why similarity? Because there was no visualization of processes as such, all management took place on requests via SMS. First, it was necessary to make a request for a status, and then, accordingly, it was required to send an SMS to disconnect one or another node. Agree, not very convenient. It was required to remember a lot of SMS commands, and also everything turned out not quite the way I wanted to implement. For example, heating control: the coolant drop was about two degrees, and this is very noticeable.

Point in question

Of course it all worked, but there was no satisfaction. And then the solution came - a controller with a built-in web browser: it can be used both on large objects for automation, and on small ones, such as houses, cottages or offices. A huge plus is the built-in web browser, free, which can replace a full-fledged SCADA system, which is used for visualization, and your mobile device or PC will become a full-fledged home control panel or apartment.

I didn't need to redo anything, I just replaced the controller. I also rewrote the heating control operation algorithm and thanks to the built-in PID control, I achieved that the difference in the coolant was only 0.3 degrees. And I also drew a plan of the apartment in a web browser, indicated the location of the controlled nodes and their state, and now I could control the apartment only by pressing a button on the phone screen.

What happened in the end

• Lighting control - if I forget to turn off the light, I can always do it remotely.
• Climate - the temperature in the apartment is always comfortable.
• Security - my apartment is completely protected from both intrusion and fire.

How do you feel about a smart home? Write in the comments!

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