I have a diy heated floor setup, plumbing is good (hot water goes in, colder water goes out), but because I have a tankless water heater I really need it to run at full pressure, then stop, compared to getting away with a low flow setup.
So that said, I am thinking some kind of electronic valve or something. That said maybe I just don’t have the right term but I cannot find what I am thinking of for a simple diy thing. I am this close to trying to mount a servo the the pex valve I have on it now, but those suckers are tough to move and didn’t want to have to trial and error that too much
I am assuming that the heating plumbing is is a closed-loop that is initially filled from the house plumbing, but after that runs on its own? (Maybe with propylene glycol added for non-toxic antifreeze)? If that is the case, why not skip the valves by using wide-open plumbing and throttle the tank heater with one variable-speed drive (VFD) and the circulating pump with another VFD? I think you’ll have to use two VFDs because heaters and pumps follow different laws and end up with different 0-100% curves. And you’ll need suitable temperature feedback from a/some thermistors, thermocouples, RTDs, IC chips, etc. Maybe a Raspberry Pi or an Arduino for convenient control? There are many ways to skin the proverbial cat. If you’re on city water, don’t forget to fill your closed-loop by bucket or spigot to avoid needing a backfill check valve that you’d have to test annually to keep the water dept. happy.
So now I am thinking a 110v normally close brass 1/2" valve, switch on by a combination of an ESP32-C6 and Non-Latching Mini Relay(adafruit:product:4409 (I couldn’t make this a link I guess lol)) over Zigbee (or blue tooth to start). With probably a really simple API consisting on zone (currently one) and time to be on.
The rest of the code I would rather be in home assistant or something.
So far it’s just an open loop setup, coming from well, then dumping for grey water use (paranoid about luke warm water being recirculated for drinking, but the plants and animals need water all the time). I went with open loop to take advantage of the well as a geothermal source.
Trying to aggressivly keep this already niche system simple lol, just for my own sake. Once it’s in software (home-assistant) I feel more confident with the logic getting more aggressive.
Kind of building of this comment the first I want to do is just bluetooth send command open valve for given time. The next step is zigbee controlled setup through homeassistant. Then finally some smart features, like don’t run when other water hogs are being ran (like shower or washer), run until drain water reaches desired temp, and finally run when floors are colder than target temp.
