Vulcan Heating & Bonaire Cooling

[rhamer]

I am currently in the process of building a new house.

The Building company has specified Vulcan gas central heating and Bonaire evaporative cooling.

I am not sure of the exact models of units, but they will be the current offerings I guess (I can't match the builders part numbers with the manufacturers yet)

Has anybody had any experience interfacing HA to these units, either C-Bus or anyway else?

Regards

Rohan

[rhamer]

Well I can now answer my own question (to a point)

I haven't actually moved in and done the interfacing yet, but this is what I know so far.

Both the Vulcan and Bonaire units come from the same company, Climate Technologies.

They now produce a HA interface for their units. The interface is a small box that sits between the wall mounted touch controller and the actual heater/cooler and provides dry contact input to allow the unit to be switched on and off.

When switched on the unit honours all the settings and control from the wall mounted touch controller.

What I was thinking of doing was using additional thermostats connected to my Thinkboxx to measure the temp in the important rooms and then use Thinkboxx to turn the units on/off.I think I'm going to have problems, I dont want the AC to go through its whole startup/shutdown routine everytime the thermostat trips.

I'm not sure how usefull all this will be in practice as I think temperature control would have been nice but I guess time will tell.

The other big gotcha is the HA interface only works with the wall mounted touch control and the touch control dosen't support hand held remote control. So you can only have one or the other.

I can't tell you anymore at this stage as the installer thoughtfully threw away all the documentation that came with the unit and I'm trying to get new copies, so I know where all the wires should go (if brains were dynamite...).

Rohan