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Home Assistant is open source home automation that puts local control and privacy first. Powered by a worldwide community of tinkerers and DIY enthusiasts. Perfect to run on a Raspberry Pi or a local server. Available for free at home-assistant.io

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Does anyone know a way of calculating the energy needed to heat a home/room? (feddit.uk)

submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Does anyone know a way of calculating the amount of heating I need to maintain an average temperature in terms of kWh of heating per 24 hours? Ideally one taking into account weather conditions.

I have a pretty big Home Assistant setup which includes switches for individually controlling all the (electric) heaters in my home. I'm also using an electricity supplier that changes the amount they charge every 30 minutes to reflect supply and demand. Given these rates are published at least 24 hours in advance I can currently choose a number of hours to run the heaters per day and have an automation automatically select the cheapest periods. I'm paying less per kWh for heating than I would if I was using a gas boiler. Plus, it's all from renewables, so working out that number of hours is the next step.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago (1 children)

My thermostats compute this for me. This is all the ones I have on the ground floor (other ones aren't in HA yet). It's been a bit cold last night, around -14°C. Oh, and the chart is for yesterday.

"Cuisine" is a pretty large room of about 250-300 sq ft, and it's in kind of an open space with "Salon", hence why the latter doesn't run very often. "Bureau" is my office, about 150 sq ft, and "SDB RDC" is a bathroom / laundry room, a bit less than 100 sq ft.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Looking back in history, it's actually pretty representative and doesn't change that much even if the outside temps move by ~10°C. "Cuisine" pretty much always eats between 35 and 40 kWh per day while "Salon" doesn't do much. My house is very old (180 years old), so the insulation definitely isn't up to modern standards, but I've seen newer houses (like '50s-'70s) with worse.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

Interesting. I think the stinker for me is that I'm in a (rented) property with huge, single-pane windows and the changes can be pretty dramatic. Makes me think it's time to look for a more eco-friendly place...