This boils my piss. The conservatives have nothing to offer, but the same old shit. Migrants and house prices. The rest of this news letter is all about how rubbish the other parties are. Useless.
Estimating Heat Loss using Existing Radiators with my new Heating Monitor - First Look
youtu.be/bTRaj8FRJF4
I need some heat shrink on the terminals to improve their mechanical strength. Then a drop of thermal paste and you’re good to go. They are also pretty cheap.
I have ones like this for 15mm pipes and I’ve two more for 22mm pipes. They are pretty cheap. As I said, the drawback is the need to calculate the temp using a voltage divider.
I tried thermal paste, copper tape, tie wraps, claims. Everything I could think of. Once I discovered NTC sensors designed for pipes, I adopted them. You need the voltage divider, but I think they are more suited.
I gave up on the DB18B20 probes and settled on NTC probes with pipe clamps. With a little dab of thermal paste, they were much easier to install.
youtu.be/JLJAUqiZQoo
In my latest video, I take a look at my new Heating Monitor, which uses the Matter smart home protocol to gather temperature information from rooms and radiators.
youtu.be/bTRaj8FRJF4
Estimating Heat Loss using Existing Radiators with my new Heating Monitor - First Look
youtu.be/bTRaj8FRJF4
😂
I’ve uploaded my video on my Heating Monitor. It’s not public yet as I don’t know what thumbnail to do. Here’s the link anyway for a sneak peak :)
Estimating Heat Loss with my new Heating Monitor
youtu.be/bTRaj8FRJF4
It’s a real shame. They just went in a direction I never expected. They have lost my confidence.
I gave up and reset my branch.
Any there any git experts online will to help me with something?
I'm trying to fix a fork and squash commits, but I'm only making things worse!
My surveyed vs measured is miles off 🤣
Look what's coming out of Espressif - the ESP32-H21, an even lower power version of the H2! www.espressif.com/en/news/ESP3...
I'm looking forward to trying this one out!
Some weird outputs from this. Heating is off, but the Living Room radiator tails are surprisingly cold. The room is at 21. All the other rads in the house have tails that are much warmer. It's also showing 300W of heat, but as the rad is colder than the room, that's not possible 😶
Time to put together a little probe!
It's just occurred to me that perhaps I'm making this more difficult than it really needs to be. For panel radiators, perhaps a simple probe in the centre of the radiator, at the top, would give me the Mean Water Temperature value...
This is quite cool. Once the boiler turns off, you can see the radiator's calculated output dropping!
Heating is on for around an hour now. Heat Meter reports 6kW going into the house. My heating monitor has accounted for 5.1kW of heat being input by radiators. This is really interesting.
I've wired up all the room temperature sensors, so my code is now estimating radiator output too. Measurements are logged to MQTT, but I need to store them in InfluxDB.
Looks like the weather is going to turn cold this week. Whilst I enjoy the warm weather, when building a heat loss tool, it’s handy having cold weather 🤣
Was back in London at the weekend. I forget what a nightmare the streets are. They just can’t accommodate the number of cars.
The goal is using the data from these sensors in combination with data from my temperature sensors to guess my home's heat loss based.
It's a red-letter day! My 10 custom Matter sensors are finally connected and logging!!!
More ICD connectivity issues with my ESP32 Heating Monitor and nRF54 Sensors
In this post, I dive into more Matter ICD connectivity issues. I had two battery devices that just would not reconnect. After some digging, I found the issue in the ICD mechanism!
A screenshot of the Home Assistant Thread settings, showing two networks and all their members.
I get a sense of satisfaction when I understand things. 12 months ago, this display was a mystery to me. I had *zero* clue how this all worked. Now I have a much better idea of how Thread works and, to be honest, it's still magical!
To add one more thing, the Mayor rejected *grant* money for a solar+BESS system due to perceived (note: made up) worries on fire risk.
Counterpoint: I'm at a BESS conference and just heard Sungrow say it hasn't had a single fire event worldwide (>9GWh installed in Europe in 2025).
Trying to fix the Thread Network for my Matter Temperature Sensor
In this post, I look at my Thread network and diagnose why my Temperature Sensors keep losing connection.
I made some tee-shirts for you Smart Home owners!
tomasmcguinness.teemill.com/product/my-h...
tomasmcguinness.teemill.com/product/my-h...
