Making a heat pump smarter with pyHPSU
Cool It

© Lead Image © naiklon, 123RF.com
This article shows how to connect a Rotex heat pump with a Raspberry Pi and integrate it into a smart home solution. Building in some legacy roller blinds helps with solar gain, but it requires some extra steps.
A networked home offers a wide range of options for saving energy and increasing the comfort of residents. And these factors are also typically interdependent. A bedroom that is not used throughout the day does not need to be heated continuously in winter. But if you know that you will be going to bed at 10pm, you can program your heating to reach a comfortable temperature at the desired time. The flexibility you need for this kind of solution can only be achieved with much discipline – or with smart thermostats that correlate the room temperature and the time and initiate the heating process at the right moment.
Heat pumps offer many options for optimizing energy usage – provided they are integrated into a smart home environment. If you use your heat pump wisely, you can save electricity and still keep your home comfortably warm or cool at all times.
To integrate a heat pump sensibly into an air conditioning solution, it needs to be accessible on your own home network. This is the only way to read a value such as the current temperature in a particular room and use it as the basis for configuring the pump. I faced this very challenge a few months ago. Our new home has a heat pump by Rotex and almost obligatory underfloor heating. When we moved in, however, the only control option consisted of the thermostats installed in the individual rooms, which controlled the valves of the underfloor heating control system and therefore indirectly controlled the heat pump. Metrics available in the system itself were inaccessible on the home network, as were the existing options for dynamic reconfiguration of the heat pump. It was simply impossible to combine smart room thermometers with dynamic heating profiles without further action.
[...]
Buy this article as PDF
(incl. VAT)
Buy Linux Magazine
Subscribe to our Linux Newsletters
Find Linux and Open Source Jobs
Subscribe to our ADMIN Newsletters
Support Our Work
Linux Magazine content is made possible with support from readers like you. Please consider contributing when you’ve found an article to be beneficial.

News
-
Red Hat Releases RHEL 10 Early
Red Hat quietly rolled out the official release of RHEL 10.0 a bit early.
-
openSUSE Joins End of 10
openSUSE has decided to not only join the End of 10 movement but it also will no longer support the Deepin Desktop Environment.
-
New Version of Flatpak Released
Flatpak 1.16.1 is now available as the latest, stable version with various improvements.
-
IBM Announces Powerhouse Linux Server
IBM has unleashed a seriously powerful Linux server with the LinuxONE Emperor 5.
-
Plasma Ends LTS Releases
The KDE Plasma development team is doing away with the LTS releases for a good reason.
-
Arch Linux Available for Windows Subsystem for Linux
If you've ever wanted to use a rolling release distribution with WSL, now's your chance.
-
System76 Releases COSMIC Alpha 7
With scores of bug fixes and a really cool workspaces feature, COSMIC is looking to soon migrate from alpha to beta.
-
OpenMandriva Lx 6.0 Available for Installation
The latest release of OpenMandriva has arrived with a new kernel, an updated Plasma desktop, and a server edition.
-
TrueNAS 25.04 Arrives with Thousands of Changes
One of the most popular Linux-based NAS solutions has rolled out the latest edition, based on Ubuntu 25.04.
-
Fedora 42 Available with Two New Spins
The latest release from the Fedora Project includes the usual updates, a new kernel, an official KDE Plasma spin, and a new System76 spin.