 Oh, it's awesome. That's so cool. We can tell exactly where they go. One of the coolest things about my new house is the heating system. It takes hot water from this boiler and pumps it through the floors using this bank of valves to decide which rooms are gonna get heating at any given time. And compared to a traditional forced air system, a hydronic one like this is more efficient and it's completely silent. But the cooling is another matter altogether. This puppy right here, who I nicknamed Bryant, is grody as heck, 25 years old, and uses only a single temperature probe on the inside of the house to determine whether he turns on or not. That means whoever's hanging out in this north-facing bedroom right next to the thermostat is having a pretty good time. The whole people sitting in the living room are gonna need the fire to warm up. Meanwhile, down in the land center with all these computers. Now, I could solve these problems by paying someone to come and install an expensive multi-zone air conditioning system. But this is lying in tech tips. So instead, I'm gonna be using a Raspberry Pi and a handful of these super cool electronically controlled dampers that you can get online for like 150 bucks. That's right, fraction of the cost, and it's gonna be way better. Probably not. But what is better is shopping with Honey. Honey is the free-to-use shopping tool that helps search for some of the best promo codes on tons of your favorite sites. Get it today at joinhoney.com slash LTT. ["Join Honey"] ["Join Honey"] Before we can determine where to install our cheap AC zone controls, we need to know where the in-floor heating zones are because the last thing in the world we want is for the AC to be fighting against the heat with both of them running at the same time because the freaking zones don't line up. So we're starting here in the master bathroom where the plan is actually to eliminate one of the in-floor heating zones. You can see we've actually got easy access to show you guys how these in-floor radiant heating tubes are coiled around the room so that your toes are nice and toasty. It's actually apparently pretty common to have a separate in-floor heating zone for the master bathroom because it's pretty typical for the flooring type to be different in the bathroom compared to in the bedroom. But Yvonne and I are gonna be putting the same type of flooring in these rooms so there's a couple of good reasons to consolidate. Number one is that the thermostat for the bathroom sits right here next to the duct for the AC so it would be easy for that thermostat over on the other wall to be calling for cool while this one is getting blasted with cold air calling for heat. Number two is that implementing these AC zones is inherently more expensive and complicated than implementing these heating zones now that the tubes are already on the floor. So we're saving ourselves some complicatedness there. Fortunately, the builders did a great job of labeling everything so I know exactly where all of these cooling loops run. That means we can focus our attention on how to turn that basic single zone AC into a multi-zone one. And for that, we will be using this or something like it. This is a Honeywell TrueZone damper and what it does is it's basically just a piece of ducting that allows air to flow or does not, depending on whether the room is calling for cool or not. To do that, it uses this 24 volt AC actuator which is designed to be used with Honeywell's own system but we found that it works just fine with anything you want. I love how the readout is just mechanical. So that's how we're gonna do the main floor and the upstairs but for the basement, we've got both more possibilities and some more challenges. The original owners didn't finish the entire basement so they only put two zones down here. One for the bathroom and the rec room which is where we're standing. These were the finished parts and the wall actually ended right here and a second zone for everything else. I'm gonna show you something cool. Let's go quick before it fires. Right here on the floor. Oh, there it goes. Just kicked in. Right here on the floor, we've got six loops for that other zone and there are actually labels on these but they are completely illegible and mean nothing to me. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna whip out the thermal camera and we're gonna do a trace with the hot water that's circulating through the floor to figure out whether we can segment out, say the land room and the theater room for example which are rooms that could have very different cooling requirements. Yeah, it's gonna take a while to heat up that water. We might wanna get some lunch. You guys might have noticed a wild Jake appearing in the background of the video today. He's here to show us how this is gonna work. Hit me. Oh, I just showed up. I didn't know I had to do stuff. So once we actually get to the final install when Linus has his server rack going and his home server, we'll just run Home Assistant in a Docker container on his Unraid server. But for now, Raspi is our stand in. But Home Assistant doesn't work by magic. So first things first, we need to figure out how to close the damper. And the answer is this 24 volt power supply. Wow, wasn't that convenient. For our demonstration, I will be the lovely assistant plugging the AC power supply into the wall. Oh, did you already plug it in? Yeah, it's plugged in. Oh, we're live wires here, you wanna see some sparks? No, no, no, no, no, not necessary. Sparks, ah! Okay, there's like kind of your gas. Can you unplug that actually? Yes. Now when I went in and actually picked this thing up, we were going in totally blind. I actually had no idea if this was just gonna work. This could have been some weird proprietary crap that Honeywell requires you to like wire up in a certain way with a special power supply. But fortunately, it's just 24 volt AC. So we plug it in, and we plug it in. And you plug it in. Time for the big test, put your hand in there. I'm not putting my hand in there. You ready? I'm ready. Oh, it's moving, isn't it? Yeah. Nice! I think the closing time on this thing is 30 seconds. Okay. But- That makes sense. You don't wanna have like a sudden shock to the system. It like flips closed and there's all this back pressure. Yeah, just like when you shut your hose really fast, you might hear a thump, which is called water hammer. So I guess this would be like air hammer. Air hammer. Of course. We have to be able to, I can't just stand here and go like this to control the AC in my house. Surely we can do better than that. Well, I mean, we could hire a few Linus's. And that's where this guy comes in. Now, what we're gonna use in the final install is not necessarily gonna look like this. It's gonna have a lot more channels, but this is what we had laying around and it's gonna be perfect for our demo here. This is what's known as a smart relay board. Basically, each one of these is kind of like a light switch. Rather than having a human or a Linus in this instance, actuate it, it has a wifi connection that can actually actuate it instead, just like clicking these buttons would. And the nice part is we can integrate this directly into Home Assistant. So Home Assistant can go, I wanna open that damper. Click that button, power goes through, opens that damper. It's been about 20 minutes, it's time. Oh, it's awesome. This is fricking awesome. That's so cool. We can tell exactly where they go. Oh my God, this is amazing. It's almost like it was made for this purpose. I love it. So there it is. We've got four lines into the theater room. Two of them carrying hot water in, two of them carrying cool water out. So you can see there's this clear line dividing the theater room lines from, oh, here we go. It goes out here. So this room has four as well then. One, two, three, four. Oh shoot, I got prematurely. I think my hopes are dashed. Yeah, I think it's four lines. I don't know what's going on. I think they really did just kind of YOLO it. The bad news is that the zones overlap a fair bit. The good news is that it seems like for the theater room at least, there's one coil that does most of the heating. So if you look here, this boy comes in and actually crosses over one of the other tubes at the end there, you see that? So it comes in, it comes down here and is actually predominantly for this room that we're standing in. Meanwhile, this other one here, this guy right here goes all the way along the whole floor. So it's only that one edge of the room that would get any heating from this room's zone. So we could probably get away with it because it wouldn't heat that room very much and the main coil would. I think it's negligible enough. And plus it would shut off once this room is heated. Exactly. I think it's okay. Yeah. So now you just have to give this to the plumbing guys and see if they can figure it out. Yeah. Yeah. Nice. Good luck plumbing guys. Did we show the wiring for this? No, we didn't. Okay. So very simple. Same 24 volt power supply or well transformer really cause it's AC to AC. And then we're going into the actuator here. The only difference is that we've got our little wifi relay in line. You guys might actually remember this thing from when I smartified my garage door. So super straightforward. Jake through home assistant, press the button. Beautiful. You can see it activates here. The damper opens. Freaking awesome. Except these things honestly, aren't that great. I ended up bricking mine because it turns out there is no hardware way to factory reset it. You have to tell it through software to factory reset which is the stupidest thing ever. Because if you change your wifi, blah, blah, blah the point is it's bricked. These things suck. So we're going to be using a bigger one that runs Tasmota firmware, which is way better. So the reason we have this set up to close by default when this is off, it's just so when we're like programming it and home assistant, it makes a little more sense for that relay to be on when it is doing air and off when it is closed. So it's off, it's closing. It's just like a brain logic thing. Because regardless, when this is closed, it uses power. So whatever. Of course it's still a human pressing buttons. We're getting to that. Now the most obvious substitute for a human finger would be a thermostat, but we've got a couple of problems. First and foremost, having 10 thermostats control the same AC doesn't really work. And on top of that, how is that going to control a damper? I mean, look at it. This is some ancient technology. It's kind of beautiful. There's only two wires going to this thing which go to a 24 volt power supply back in the mechanical room that controls the valve for that particular heating zone. So what that means is basically this physical ass freaking mercury either tips and completes the 24 volt circuit opening the valve or it doesn't touch the metal contact and the valve closes. That's it. Most smart thermostats, actually a lot of them don't even work on three wire, let alone on two wire. Screwdriver's not for sale on the store yet. So buy a shirt, lttstore.com. Oh, that's awesome. Thankfully you guys were full of lots of good ideas in the comments on my last video about the new house. There were some really awful ideas as well. Terrible ones. But there were some good ones. One way we could tackle this is running more conductors. But unfortunately that would require ripping up not just walls, but in some cases, even flooring of the house in order to do that. That is not happening. There's 10 of these. But there were some other ideas as well. One was to just run temperature sensors in the rooms and then have everything controlled via Home Assistant. The problem with that idea was that the wife and the kids want a bit more of a user-friendly way of interfacing with the heat and cooling controls in each room. One suggestion we got a bunch of times was to use a thermostat from someone like Techmar that just uses these for power and then communicates wirelessly back to what is kind of the real thermostat back in the mechanical room that has multiple wires for heating, fan, and AC. The problem with that is then I'm buying into someone's like stupid proprietary thing and I'm adding a bunch more complexity that honestly isn't necessary. Thank you for the suggestion though. That was not one of the stupid suggestions. And the solution, well, turns out it's a smart thermostat anyways. What we actually ended up with is an Ecobee 3 Lite and this was almost totally by accident. We have these installed at the office and I was just kind of checking it for reference. Turns out these guys are HomeKit enabled, which means we can have direct connection to them, no cloud necessary, which was one of your prereqs that was a big thing for me. I don't wanna wait for a relay and if some stupid cloud services down, I don't wanna not be able to control. Or have no AC at all, right? So you plug this guy in, it's basically just got the two wires for power, which right now is hooked up to this guy, but in the future we'll be directly wired through this existing wiring. Plug it in. Turns right on. Now the really nice thing about these Ecobee is, notice we only have two wires connected, but in here it thinks it has six. We can just lie to it. You can literally go in and tell it, that wire's connected, that wire's connected, that one's connected, that one's connected. So this thing thinks it's directly connected to an AC, directly connected to a fan and directly connected to a boiler, but it's not at all. This way we get the full brain sort of smart sensing, smart run up, smart run down of this thermostat and then we just take what it wants to do. Like say it's too hot in here, I wanna cool off. It's gonna turn into cooling mode and then we can read that in Home Assistant. Home Assistant's like, whoa, this thing's in cooling mode now, let me turn on the AC and open that valve. Before we can do the big demo, we need to do a couple of things. Starting with hooking up, well, some of the multiple aspects of the heating and cooling system. So you can see we've got our AC zone one, that's our damper. We've got our heat zone one. So that's gonna hook up to the valve on the boiler. We've got our AC power, that's gonna tell it to turn on the compressor. And then of course we've got our fan power, which is gonna tell the air conditioner to blow cool air around the house. So right now for the purposes of our demo, we've just got AC and fan. Then in Home Assistant, Jake has been setting up automations, which are effectively scripts that allow all of these elements to interact with each other because the last thing you want is to kick on your fan and your compressor, but then have your damper closed because then you're gonna create a bunch of back pressure potentially blowing up your air conditioner. So what we've done is we've made sure that as long as one AC zone is calling for an open damper, the AC power and the fan will go on. And if all of these are closed, these will turn off. So this is it then, exactly how we want this to work. With the thermostat on the wall, someone could set a temperature hold and then, okay, at 1130 when the normal rules take over, normal scheduling, everything's just totally transparent to the user, we end it and our AC should kick on, look at that. The fan goes, the damper opens, because remember on is off for the damper, right? So it's open and we're blowing. And then if I say, okay, look, I really don't need that much cooling because I'm a hot boy. Look at that, it's fricking awesome. Look at it go. The application for stuff like this is really exciting and basically endless with just simple sensors that could be wall powered or even battery powered. You can do almost anything. You could sit down in your computer chair and have a battery powered pressure sensor that turns on a freaking desk fan. The way that I plan to use this is really to amp up the efficiency in this place. So every wall light switch is gonna have a motion sensor in it, which means that I'm going to have occupancy awareness. So the AC will never turn on in a room that hasn't had anyone in it for the last, let's say 30 or 60 minutes or something like that. It'll pretty much pay for itself. It'll just take a few years. It's really exciting. Almost as exciting as telling you about our sponsor. 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If you guys enjoyed this video, but you have no idea what the heck was going on, maybe check out part one, where I kind of show you guys around the new house and talk about this and some of the other challenges that we're gonna be trying to solve over the next few months.