About to update the 3 fourteen year old heat pumps at home. OK you home automation geeks tell us what we need to know about control.Is there an iPhone App out there that will do it?Sorry if this has been discussed before.Many thanks
Why work on Wednesday and stuff up 2 good long weekends
Thanks for your reply but I want something "off the shelf" and gauging by the number of reads of this post there is some considerable interest in the subject.Will have a poke round the major heat pump makers and see what they have in the pipeline - it is time they had something anyway.As a matter of interest - 28 years ago I could turn on the spa and underfloor heating to our house (then our holiday home) from my car 200km away! For those interested as to how: via RT and tone calling and we had 2 different tones and if both activated within 1 minute of each other this activated a relay at the holiday home! Think Tait Electronics found out about it recently and did a story in their in-house newsletter!
Why work on Wednesday and stuff up 2 good long weekends
Well have contacted Fujitsu, Toshiba and Daikin to ask them about an iPhone App for their units. Will keep the board posted! Any others you think may be worth contacting?Thanks
Why work on Wednesday and stuff up 2 good long weekends
Bloody good idea, you would think it would not be that hard to put a WiFi radio in them, connect them to your router and away you go. That would work easily for in-home control, but for control from out of the home, there would need to be some sort of server or web-based thing (Like the Sky App for MySky).
You seriously think that iPhone compatibility would be a major selling point for a heat pump?
For the geek market absolutely. (though many would probably then moan about the lack of an android app).
For the bulk of the market? Doubt it. From my buying experience and that of friends it's normally a combination of:
1. Cost 2. Efficiency (cost over time) 3. Output/Power/Size
then sometimes maybe any additional cool features on the side. But in the consumer market, cost is king.
Wifi Radios + Software Development + After Sales Support would be a significant cost with minimal returns. A differentiator sure, but I'd say most heatpump vendors would be much happier to leave it to the aftermarket home automation crowd.
Now if you start talking about industrial/commercial HVAC - where the systems already have significant development in automation, monitoring etc it would be less of a leap, plus you could cater to a market that is already willing to pay a bit extra for cool factor.
Sorry don't agree and with respect it sounds like the comment made a few decades ago that the world probably only needs about six computers!
From the Sydney Morning Herald today:
“At the Samsung Regional Forum 2012 last month, Samsung announced it would launch its wi-fi-enabled airconditioner in Australia in August, followed by a wi-fi-enabled refrigerator before Christmas.”
So think will wait and see what appears hopefully within 12 months.
Why work on Wednesday and stuff up 2 good long weekends
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Hmm, wifi on a permanently installed wall mounted appliance. Hope they don't pull a nintendo and leave the ethernet interface off it which actually makes sense for something deployed in that situation.
There are solutions about for heat pumps as most of them are desgined to have some sort of comms so they can be remotly controlled from a central point but................ there at the moment there is no complete off the shelf solution for the end user.
so what it comes down to is how much money do you want to spend sorting out the hardware side of the comms? then you only have the software side to sort out.
Give it about 5 years and you will most likely see a lot of ethernet connected appliances
That is similar to my setup but using http://wiki.linuxmce.org system with our toshiba heatpumps and is great for turning on when out for the day and want place warm when heading home or setting up more complex schedules (I find the remote ones pretty rubbish but could just be me).
The main issue is that the aircon units do not tranismit their current state. So if you use the aircon remote and these systems then it all gets out of sync.
Can't understand why all appliances don't come with an Ethernet port for remote control - I'd certainly pay a little more for a remote controllable option!
Immediate thoughts include heat pump, oven, electric blankets, and I'm sure there are 101 other great ideas.
Things are LookingUp.... A photo from my back yard :-)
If nest (www.nest.com) did a version that included a IR blaster for heat pumps... Would pay a lot. I hate the limited programming of the remotes that come with heatpumps here.
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