Anyone controlling a pellet stove?

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I’m a proud owner of a brand new pellet stove
Obviously, this needs to be tweaked and hacked so I can control it exactly the way I want. The stove has a controlpanel on top of it, and can be controlled with a infrared remote.
I have decoded the IR commands into raw pulses and use ESPimatic to send these IR commands to the stove. Works like a charm, achievement unlocked!

Now the big question: how to control this with Pimatic? Using a pellet stove is new for me, only had a analog wood stove before.
Controlling my normal heat is quite straight forward: use the dummy-thermostat and switch the heat on or off based on some variables, moment of the day and room temperature.
Using a stove for heating is something complletely different. Not only is the type of heat/temperature different from normal radiator heating, you just can’t turn the stove on for 10 minutes.

My idea is to turn the stove ON with warmth is needed, letting it burn for at least 1 hour. If the desired temperature is not reached after this hour just let it burn until temperature is reached.
I’m also thinking of not turning the stove on after at least 1 hour after turning it OFF (when the stove is turned off, it does a cooling down, pushing all the warmth out of the stove into the room).
Depending on the temperature drop I’m also considering keeping the stove off during the night, because it can warm up the room so quickly.

Anyone some experiences with controlling a (pellet) stove with Pimatic? Ideas and input is welcome to figure out how to use the stove in the real world.

(and yes, the stove has it’s own temperature sensor and ‘thermostat’. Can be programmed with day to day schedules and desired temperatures, but that’s to standalone for me. I want to be able to turn on/off the stove with my phone when I;m not at home or in the car driving to home)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7kLeuirPqQ

Increase the hysteresis of your stove. Don’t use time based rules.

That’s not what I want

It 's inefficient to fire the stove shortly after extinguishing the fire. There is a lot of warmth still in the stove that’s being spread into the room. It’s also inefficient to fire the stove for a short time.
Last but not least: I want to be able to start or stop the stove when needed (or disable the chance that it’s being fired up) because I now I won’t be at home for at least 5 or 6 hours.
The warmth given by the stove is entirely different than normal radiator. When the DS18B20 sensor reports 19.5 degrees with radiator, it feels cold. With the stove (not burning) it still feels warm. This is also the result of the big fans used by the stove to warm the entire room (where the radiators aren’t capable do the same).

i am having an mcz gea pellet stove with 9 kw. unfortunately i have not been able to capture the rf commands yet for building a protocol for it.

just an information, i do not let the oven run at night. as you said, it’s heating up the room really quick. in my living room the temperature even at night is not dropping below 16/17 degrees in the winter. in the mornings the oven is turning on at 5 o clock due to its time table and heats the room to 20 degrees, then it is switching to the lowest fan and pellet fire settings.

for me, my oven is not powering off completely when reaching the desired temp. it could do, but it will use more pellets to power it up again then let it burn on the lowes level.

This is what you want

If you use timerules it is getting to warm or to cold inside,depending of the outside temperature.

Raise the hysteresis.

If you want 20° with hysteresis 0.2
The stove will start at 19.8° and will stop at 20.2°.

If the hysteresis is 1°(that is probably to much)
The stove will start at 19° and will stop at 21°.

So there is no reason to start over again! The temperature has to drop below 19° to start the stove again.

My “stove” is electric, wich is not the same. But it is acting the same. If you heat an electric heater for a short time, it will not get hot–wasting just energy

@leader21 said in Anyone controlling a pellet stove?:

i am having an mcz gea pellet stove with 9 kw. unfortunately i have not been able to capture the rf commands yet for building a protocol for it.

just an information, i do not let the oven run at night. as you said, it’s heating up the room really quick. in my living room the temperature even at night is not dropping below 16/17 degrees in the winter. in the mornings the oven is turning on at 5 o clock due to its time table and heats the room to 20 degrees, then it is switching to the lowest fan and pellet fire settings.

for me, my oven is not powering off completely when reaching the desired temp. it could do, but it will use more pellets to power it up again then let it burn on the lowes level.

I have the same idea, not firing up at night because it can heat the room quick enough (Magikal Solea Cuba 13 kw).
But I don’t want to be bound to the schedule of the stove. If i’m leaving on saturday, knowing that I will return at midnight going to bed immediately, I don’t want the stove to kick in (or at least not raise to 20+ degrees). Or perhaps I will be returning home earlier than I thought and want to preheat so it’s nice and warm when I get home.

@Michael-Rudek said in Anyone controlling a pellet stove?:

This is what you want

If you use timerules it is getting to warm or to cold inside,depending of the outside temperature.

Raise the hysteresis.

If you want 20° with hysteresis 0.2
The stove will start at 19.8° and will stop at 20.2°.

If the hysteresis is 1°(that is possible to much)
The stove will start at 19° and will stop at 21°.

So there is no reason to start over again! The temperature has to drop below 19° to start the stove again.

My “stove” is electric, wich is not the same. But it is acting the same. If you heat an electric heater for a short time, it will not get hot–wasting just energy

My goal is not to heat up based on time but based on temperature (but only if a certain temp is required based on being at home or not). I want to control when it will be on or off. But IF I’m going to turn it on or off I need to keep in mind that it’s not a normal heater that you turn off just 5 minutes after turning it on.
As far as I know, I’m not able to change the hysteresis.

Why are you bound to the schedule of the oven?
I saw you are using ChronoTherm. Just send the the goaltemperature to your oven.

I’m shure you can set the hysteresis, maybe it is in a hidden menu…
If not you can make your own with pimatic. Just switch your oven from 22° to 15° and vice versa. Don’t set the temperatures to high or to low, cause pimatic can crash(faulty SD, whatever)

My Heater is a Einhell GCH 2000, wich is crap.
The control of it is just sh**t.
So i made my own control with a particle photon, which contains 2 relais and a temperature sensor. It is better if a heating control is independent (cause pimatic can crash )
The photon is connected via mqtt to pimatic and ChronoTherm.
ChronoTherm just sends the temperatures.
In your case, you would send the temperature by IR.
I’m shiftworker, so i made a 3 Buttonsdevice with “Früh”, “Spät” und “Urlaub” wich sends the right variables to the varable that contains the"weekprogram".

@Michael-Rudek said in Anyone controlling a pellet stove?:

Why are you bound to the schedule of the oven?

I’m not bound to the schedule. I can choose to do a weekly schedule, or just ‘manual’ based on room temperature and a temperature you want to reach. Having Pimatic and all it’s glory, I simply just don’t want to to use the schedule on the stove itself - I can do better with Pimatic

I saw you are using ChronoTherm. Just send the the goaltemperature to your oven.

Thought about it, but it’s going to be tricky. If I press (or send) ‘temperature plus’ to the stove it switches to the current setting on the display. If nothing happens the display will switch back to normal. When I press plus (or minus) when the temperature is on the display I can increase / decrease the temp.
This will be something difficult to maintain with pimatic. If someone changes the temp manual on the stove the setting temp on pimatic is allready out of sync.

I’m shure you can set the hysteresis, maybe it is in a hidden menu…

Probably on the hidden menu, the seller refused to give the access code.

Then set your oven to 22° or a little bit more and switch it on and off (standby) by rule with ChronoTherm.
Make 2 rules.
On with goaltemperature-0.5,
Off with goaltemperature+0.5
The goaltemperature is $room.result

@Michael-Rudek said in Anyone controlling a pellet stove?:

Then set your oven to 22° or a little bit more and switch it on and off (standby) by rule with ChronoTherm.
Make 2 rules.
On with goaltemperature-0.5,
Off with goaltemperature+0.5
The goaltemperature is $room.result

That’s what my starting point is
But on top of that I need to take time also in account. When I turn the stove OFF it’s doing a shutdown, blowing all the wamrth out of the stove into the room. During this action you can’t turn in it on again. So I need to look at periods of time the stove has been shutdown. Take at least 30+ minutes to start the stove after a shutdown. But also take time for the stove to get to optimal heating state (so don’t turn it off if setpoint has reached but wait at least 30 or 60 minutes to turn it off after starting up). That’s the field experience I’m looking for in this topic.

No, you don’t need time.
It is just not necessary, if you have the hysteresis of 1° or something like that.
The time is in cooling down your room/house, or heating it up.
It is an other thing if your playing with the controller of your oven, or if you really wait that your room cools down.

And by the way, it is wrong to let your house cool down to much. Cooling down a house with more then 2° will not save money. You have to heat up every brick in your house again. That means that your oven will switch on-off-on-off if you are playing with the"Nachtabsenkung" to hard, till the bricks around you have room temperature

I simply CAN’T turn on the stove when it is in progress of shutting down. This can take up to half an hour. This would result in pimatic thinking it turned the stove on, but the stove ignored the command.

You don’t NEED to turn it off and on again within half an hour, if your house is not cooled down completely.
I’m heating with wood too (Grundofen). If your house is cooled down it will take days to normalize the behavior of your oven and your room temperature .
Let it run for a while and you will see that the temperature will not jump like it did before.
Controlling it with pimatic is fine, but don’t try to “over tune”

This is not like firing a normal Woodburner(Kaminofen—aus=kalt), it is more like a Central heating or a “Grund/Kachelofen”. Let it run for a while, and you will see that it is not starting so often anymore.

Maybe you can switch between Auto and Manual with pimatic?
That the oven doesn’t shut down completely and you have 2 temperatures of your choice?

Just an idea…
What is the temperature range of the stove.
In which stepsize? 0.1 or 0.5?
What happens if you press (-) at minimum temperature again? Or (+) at maximum?
Is the oven beeping with every command you send?

Maybe you can “calibrate” the “set temperature” with every command you send.
Example :
Oven is set to 20° and should be set to 21°, minimum is 10°, stepsize is 0.5.
You have to send 20 times (-) to set to 10°. But to be shure you send 30 times(calibrate) and then 22 times (+) to reach 21°
But you will need a script or a plugin to do this.
You don’t want this if the oven is beeping all the time

@Michael-Rudek said in Anyone controlling a pellet stove?:

Just an idea…
What is the temperature range of the stove.
In which stepsize? 0.1 or 0.5?
What happens if you press (-) at minimum temperature again? Or (+) at maximum?
Is the oven beeping with every command you send?

Maybe you can “calibrate” the “set temperature” with every command you send.
Example :
Oven is set to 20° and should be set to 21°, minimum is 10°, stepsize is 0.5.
You have to send 20 times (-) to set to 10°. But to be shure you send 30 times(calibrate) and then 22 times (+) to reach 21°
But you will need a script or a plugin to do this.
You don’t want this if the oven is beeping all the time

There is a beep/buzzer, but it’s disabled
I have thought of this method, to allways go to the lowest value possible and then set the correct amount. For temperature this could be a little to much work (iirc the lowest temperature possible is 15 degrees, stepsize is 1). But for the power mode this should be possible (5 power modes).
For now I will first start with just turning the stove ON and OFF and don’t change power mode of temperature. When I have this working without any problems I can go to the next phase and try changing the power mode and desired temperature.

If stepsize is 1, maybe a rule can do this. I’ve never tried it. Don’t know how long a rule can be.
In practice you will not need more then 3 temperatures.
Try to send your lirc command (-) 7-10 times always with and after 1 second between the commands and then with (+) to your wanted temperature

OK, so I have been testing with the stove the last week. It’s getting how I want it to work
Before the I installed the stove I was using something that is called “city heating”. Most of the houses in the Netherlands just have a gasline coming in, and heating with a boiler / central heating. Unfortunately when a city pans new areas with city heating they don’t install gas. So I’m bound to the city heating monopoly
The only advantage of city heating : turning it on or off is as easy as ON and OFF , no modulating boiler to work with.
Pimatic was controlling a relay that could open or close the main valve for the warm radiator water. To col? Open the relay. Warm enough? Close the relay.

The goal was to heat the living area with the pellet stove and simply don’t use the city heating anymore. To do is, I needed to take full control of the pellet stove.
Before the stove I used a dummy thermostat device where the Setpoint was controlled by a bunch of rules. The rules where following a program dictated by our weekly schedule. When someone stayed at home on a day the programming wasn’t expecting anyone I turned a dummy device called “today as Sunday” on it the rules would control the setpoint as if it was a Sunday (= i’m home the entire day).

I have abandoned all these rules now. The 3 major cellphones in our family are pinged every minute. If at least 1 reports present a dummy presence device called “Anybody home” is set to present. If all 3 phones report absent it is set to absent.
The dummy thermostat is still used, but other rules now change the setpoint. When at least 1 person is at home, the setpoint is set to 20. During the night it is set to 16.5
When nobody is home during the day, it is set to 17. So when we leave the house (going to work / school) the last cell phone leaving the house automatically sets the setpoint back to 17. When someone arrives later in the day it is set to 20 automatically.
When the room temperature drops below the setpoint (minus a margin) and the stove has been OFF for at least 1 hour the stove gets the ON signal. Pimatic is allowed to send a OFF signal only when: temperature (plus) margin is above setpoint for at least 10 minutes and the stove is ON for at least 1 hour.

A rule changes the setpoint from 16.5 to 20 at 05:00 in the morning (IF somebody is at home), thus the stove kicks in a 05:10 every morning. Within the hour the room is warm enough to be comfortable, even when the room temperature had dropped back to 16 degrees.

I have written a program on a ESP8266 to control the stove. Pimatic connects to the HTTP API to tell what to do, the ESP sends the IR signals to the stove.
The stove reports back the state to Pimatic, based on temperature of the exhaust. When the temperature of the exhaust rises with a certain pattern, it reports ‘flame detected’ and tells the stove is on.
So when I manually turn the stove on Pimatic still knows it is already burning.

Anyways … for now everything seems to operate as I intended at the beginning of the project and works without any major problems. Along the way I needed to tweak some stuff but it’s getting better and better.
The margin used to turn of the stove was set to 0.4 degrees. My roomtemperature is measured in steps of 0.25 degrees. So when the setpoint is set to 20, the stove is turned of when room temperature is at least 20.5
It turned out that especially in the morning this was a bit to soon to turn of the stove. The room temperature would drop to rapid below 20 degrees (but the rules prohibit to turn on the stove for the coming hour). I have edited the rules to change the margin to 0.6 when it is between 05:00 and 22:00 when there are is someone at home (so Pimatic will turn of the stove when it is at least 20.75). During the night (or when no one is at home) the margin is set to 0.4

When the dummy thermostat is set to boost the following happens : setpoint stays at current setting, rules do not change the setpoint. When it is to cold, the stove is turned on. As long as the thermostat is set to boost, the stove is not turned off. This allows the stove to control itself based on the room temperature and the setting on the stove itself. I can keep it on boost for the entire day and the stove will automatically shutdown or kick in. With a single button I set the thermostat from boost to auto and everything is back to normal based on presence of family in the house.

I hope somebody finds this information useful on how to monitor and control heating with pimatic with several approaches.

very nice description!! it’s very interesting how creative you become with esp developent

quote:

The stove reports back the state to Pimatic, based on temperature of the exhaust. When the temperature of the exhaust rises with a certain pattern, it reports ‘flame detected’ and tells the stove is on.

how do you get the exhaust data from the stove? using an external ds18b20 on the pipe or from the stove directly?
i once was thinking of playing around with ESPimatic analog input and a flame sensor.
but having the exaust temp is a great idea!

@leader21 said in Anyone controlling a pellet stove?:

very nice description!! it’s very interesting how creative you become with esp developent

quote:

The stove reports back the state to Pimatic, based on temperature of the exhaust. When the temperature of the exhaust rises with a certain pattern, it reports ‘flame detected’ and tells the stove is on.

how do you get the exhaust data from the stove? using an external ds18b20 on the pipe or from the stove directly?
i once was thinking of playing around with ESPimatic analog input and a flame sensor.
but having the exaust temp is a great idea!

Thanks
Since my seller might be interested in a simple userfriendly solution I didn’t want to hack onto the motherboard. So yes, I have attached a DS18B20 on the exhaust. On the backside of the stove is a hole to insert the exhaust. A waterproof DS18b20 could be inserted between the hole and the pipe just to place it quite firm.
In the meantime there is also a ultrasonic sensor place into hopper to report some info about how much pellets are left

looking great!
sounds like an ESPimaticStove is being born