Bazsi's Home Automation blog

In this series of blog posts I am revisiting the process of troubleshooting the heating system in our new house. In the past installments I've described the most important elements of the system (and the ones I fixed), since those didn't reveal the true issue with my heating, I needed to go on. This post is about my monitoring gear. Temperature sensing was a key element of finding the solution. First of all, I have a number of analogue temperature gauges around the boiler/furnace, each attached to a specific section of the system. What I had to learn was that these gauges are very slow to react, and thus were pretty much unusable for my goals. If your temperature has very low volatility, they might be fine, but if you want to understand how and why temperature changes, you will need something that gives you a reading every 10-30 seconds. To address this problem I used a dormant Raspberry Pi and a pair or Onewire sensors I had lying around. These were of the type DS18