Mariusthvdb
commented
10 months ago starting an issue with a rant isnt going ton help is it? Nor iw writing up a complete chapati, instead of a concise actual issue you are experiencing with the current features.
If you want to have the Mill team create new stuff, write a feature request, just like you would need to do at Home Assistant, which you quote to be using (me too btw).
cut it short: be polite and make it brief. I get what you are after, but this wont help
@millheat Im amazed how bad you guys reply to questions here. some posts go back to march without any reply. The reason i say this is because i really like the products and the open API idea. more companies should do this. The only problem i have is that the documentation here and on the mill openapi website is very limited. If people buy very expensive products (a heater that cost nearly 300 euro is very expensive) then i think a little support to get them going is the least a company can provide for its customers.
Back on topic: Im planning on buying gen3 mill heaters and place them throughout the house. The past 4 years i have been building our smarthome with home assistant in which everything you can think of is automated. We have 2 AC's that are fully automated and the last step would be to buy and place 4 mill heaters. I read that the gen3 devices can be controlled using max power output. I do wonder how this works. On github i found this page which explains some things about the api but im not sure if these heaters can do what i want. Before buying them i first want to know if what i want is possible.
So my idea is to control the heaters directly with the local api and set the power of these devices according to the solar power output of our solarpanels. So if our solar panels output 2000 watts of power i would like to be able to set the power of these mill heaters to 500 watts each. so the total of 4 will consume 2000 watts until a room has the right temperature in which that heater is turned off and the power on the other 3 is increased to around 660 watts. in the api on github i only see
POST http://{{heater_address}}/max-heater-power
Which sets the max power output and not the current power. I wonder if when the pid is turned off and the device is set to manual this option will work to set the heater to a specific power level. What i also would like to know is what valid power inputs there are. i guess that a power level of 1 watts isnt possible. There must be a minimum i guess. The documentation you provide isnt very clear with this information.
Could you please advise on this some more?
So in short:
These devices can be pretty amazing but i think the software need more work. These devices are always temperature based. which sounds logical ofcourse but for advanced smarthomes sometimes we need to go a step further. Everyone knows that solar power isnt always stable with clouds before the sun etc. So in our smarthome i want to go a step further. If home assistant gets the solar prediction from next hour and it looks like its going to be sunny i want to be able to let our smart system heat up rooms regardless of the fact that the temperature that is set is allready met. So if the next hour there is no sun the heaters are set back to the minimum power level. this way our smart home is constantly controling the power of these heaters according to whats comming in through the solar.
Everyone at the moment thinks that things are smart when you can set a temperature using an app... there is so much more to do before things get really smart though. I am constantly running up against the limits of what is possible with smart devices. It would be great if companies go the extra mile and make their products actually smart. open api's with full control is a step in the right direction. But i keep wondering if you have a pid controller that can controll the power output. it should also be possible to set it manually with an api. and not only the max power but also the current power. this way people can run their own pid from within a smarthome and bring in more factors like power consumtion, weather and solar production and maybe even a solar battery (starting the heaters on a specific power level so it can heat for 8 hours calculated by the amount of power in the battery) think further. make products really smart!