These boost controls cover 5 zones in a local church. They are spot on and simply close a relay in the heating control panel to bring the heating on for 1,2,3,4 or 5 hour periods. I was wondering if this could be set up to be selected remotely by an Ap of some kind even if it meant simple on off.
As another member who is looking into similar heating issues, I just searched on-line and may have hit lucky? http://mselectronics.co.uk/our-products/product-category/extension-timers/ some of this company's products have an external trigger facility, which may help. Plus they offer customisation. What make are the timers in your installation?
The make is Produal. The church would be happy enough with a simple time clock in parallel or a replacement 24v time clock that had some boost control options. Going that route would mean fitting in to a standard single gang back box. However, I rather thought that providing an instruction via an internet connection would be a good way to go. There is good internet connection in the church.
I'm also looking for this for a church, without going to the expense of Honeywell Evohome or similar.
But what we have done in the interim is a programmeable thermostat so you can set the ON OFF times for a week ahead. to repeat until changed (and you can also put the heating on if you arrive to find no one had set it). There is a wifi version as well so you can move the position of the controller without needing to rewire.
Also, if your building is slow to heat up, you can set it for progressive warming, i.e. 16°C at 6:00am. 18°C at 8:00am and 20°C at 10:00am rather than a full on off system. This means that the heating does not come on much earlier than needed on a warm night.
All this talk of heating in churches is just plain soft!
Mind you, I do admire the heaters in Ely Cathedral - if you have ever spent a winter in the fens, you will know why they were put in. Picture and some info on heating churches in general here.
Turns out that they only want to set a time on/off on sporadic days. So for example, a funeral up to a week in advance, meetings etc with no particular pattern perhaps a month in advance. I don’t see any systems that will allow this but at the same time, one imagines that it should be simple to do, preferably with an Ap.
I do this for a Bowling club using the Salus programmable thermostat.
Every Monday I go up and look in the diary and set the unit for the week ahead. There are a mixture of regular weekly items, regular fortnightly meetings and random ones.
I keep a spreadsheet for the week on which I record the meetings and what settings I have decided to set. Then the next week I amend this sheet which tells me immediately which settings need to be changed
However I am sure that the Honeywell Evohome or the Drayton Wiser systems would be up for this to be done over the internet. I am exploring them but I have no direct experience yet.
You might want to search app-controlled lighting controllers instead of 5-zone heating controllers.
Do you need to have app control of each zone separately? you could choose a few zones to be controlled by something like RT310i - SALUS Controls UK (salus-controls.com) which has an advantage of being able to see the temperature in the church from the phone, it could be wired in parallel to keep existing timers.
