Finally finished the Arduino project that we needed before we left for vacation!
We’ve had to renovate the basement twice because of freezing boiler pipes when it gets cold. This wasn’t a problem when the original, undersized boiler was working overtime to keep the house warm when it gets really cold.
But the new, properly sized boiler doesn’t work that hard, so the pipes that aren’t insulated well (and hard to get at) now sit idle long enough to freeze.
We were going to dig 4 foot of gravel away from under the pipes so I could get at them and properly apply heat trace, but that didn’t happen this year.
Then I was going to add small space heaters, but that would only heat the pipes I can see and would probably be a fire hazard.
Then I realized that I have a way of heating the pipes…the boiler! The problem is that it’s not turning on when the pipes get cold. I could crank the temp up, but that would jack our energy bill up. What we needed was something that could sense the pipe temp and outside air and then close the appropriate valves.
Arduino’s are a perfect application, but I don’t know how to program an Arduino and I already have enough projects. So I hired a guy on Fiverr to specify what I need to buy, how to connect it, and supply the programming that will:
- If the outside temperature drops below -5°C, operate the relay for 10 minutes every hour until the outside temperature exceeds -5°C.
- If the pipe temperature drops below 0°C, operate the relay for at least 5 minutes. De-energize the relay when the temperature >5°C.
Turns out the guy was terrible. He had me order the wrong parts, forgot to include some parts I needed, and told me to connect them incorrectly.
Once I got all that sorted, I could see (without any Arduino coding experience) that his code wasn’t going to do what I wanted, which took many edits to fix.
Once we got it uploaded to all three devices, the temperature sensing would go up when the actual temperature went down. So I gave up on him after trying many of his revisions, spent hours learning Arduino, and finally fixed it myself.
Once the two boxes were measuring the correct temperature, the receiver that would turn the valves on and off wouldn’t talk to both boxes at the same time. I gave up on the guy after a few revisions and once again figured it out myself.
Once the two boxes were measuring the temperature, and the receiver box was getting data from both of them, the code that was supposed to turn the valves on and off wouldn’t work. After several revisions with the Fiverr guy, I finally gave up on him and did it myself.
My code wasn’t perfect, however. I spent at least two hours figuring out that “if (timedelay_on = 0)” is NOT the same as if (timedelay_on == 0). Once I got over that hiccup, I started testing with the demo $60,000 test-set I used to sell to act as a data logger for $100 worth of Arduino parts.
In the end, it turned out that I did have time to figure this out myself and I probably would have spent less time just doing it myself.
Once the final testing is done, I’ll install one box outside to monitor the outside temp, one box in the spare bedroom with temperature sensors to monitor the pipe temperature, and one unit at the boiler to turn the valves on and off.
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