Project Homeassistant

Remote Measurement

Meteo services have recently predicted very cold weather next week. Temperatures here in Zagreb could fall to -15°C or even more. It’s very worrying for everybody who has a house with plumbing installation but no tenants and no heating. So there’s definitely danger of freezing of remaining water in pipes and damaging of plumbing installation.

Plumbing installation input into my house is about 1.5 m under the ground surface and leads into the basement. Installation is now empty but there is about 1m water column in the main pipe that I could’t pour out. The basement is completely made of reinforced concrete which is half dug into the ground. Due to very high temperature conductivity, low air temperatures could damage the installation.

Solution

Put Styrofoam

Plumbing input and drain pipes system are separated from bathroom and they are placed in 1x0.5 m small (sub)room made to hide pipes but keep access for maintenance. After I put styorfoam, pipes are enclosed in space (sub-sub-space) of cca 50 l which makes easier temperature maintenance.

Set Remote Metering Station

Measurement station consists of:

• HP ThinClient T630
• Temperature sensors made of ESP32 S2 and BME680 - firmware ESPHome

HP ThinClient T630

docker run -d \
  --name homeassistant \
  --privileged \
  --restart=unless-stopped \
  -e TZ=MY_TIME_ZONE \
  -v /PATH_TO_YOUR_CONFIG:/config \
  -v /run/dbus:/run/dbus:ro \
  --network=host \
  ghcr.io/home-assistant/home-assistant:stable

Put Heating Device

I’m currently looking for a small, 100W robust heater, 220 V. I hope it will maintain 30l of the insulated space above the zero.

I finally found 60W incandescent light bulb so I place it inside the styrofoam chamber and it looks like this:

Results

This is a graph that shows external air temperature and temperature measured in the basement. External temperatures have been retrieved from open-meteo.com Basement temperature shown here is temperature in basement not in the insulated enclosed space!!!