Since my Home Assistant installation has become pretty filled I wanted to add something new to make it even more capable. The first thing that came to my mind was my little project list in my notes somewhere. The first item was to build a convector radiator. So that’s what I did!
A convector radiator is a conventional radiator, but with fans on top or underneath the radiator. This makes a more efficient heat exchange possible. Some commercial products even claim the internal temperature of the radiator can be turned down to fourty degrees celcius! Even more reasons to try it out.
All the woodwork that had to be done has been done by my father Chris. We could’ve gone with a couple of holes but wanted to make it look fancy and not disruptive in the livingroom. We came up with the idea to make a giant vent in the front to be able to add some sort of mesh texture against dust in the future.
Materials
There actually aren’t that much materials needed for the technical part. Especially if you’re using Home Assistant like me. The list consists of the following items:
- Wemos D1 Mini
- DC Barrel Jack
- Some Capacitors
- LM35 Temperature Sensor
- Diode
- 4 10K Resistors
- Microswitch
- LM2596
Of course you also need fans. There are a couple of possibilities. You can use a traditional PC fan with 2 wires. You’ll need some sort of transistor or mosfet to PWM ‘it’. Three wire and four wire fans are the favourite. They are made to be controlled by PWM. I used some Arctic F8 PWM fans without PST.
The code can be found in my GitHub repository.
