You can buy those SSR without the heat sink, it wasn’t that much more for one with a heat sink so I bought that one. I have no idea how hot it will actually get? I was planning on just using one of those plastic electrical junction boxes to put the relays into etc.
The wall switch in the kitchen just looks like a regular cooker type switch, it’s silver with a red On/Off switch, I assume it’s double pole.
The switch in the airing cupboard is more old school 70s type, I planned to change that for a double pole fused spur switch with flex outlet.
Ideally it would be nice to have the switch in the kitchen still function, where it could still be used to turn on and off the immersion. But I imagined having both the relays wired in upstairs in the airing cupboard would mean that the switch in the kitchen would have to be left permanently in the On position.
I think if I was just using the Fibaro 3KW relay only I would understand the wiring a bit better, but also adding the second SSR relay has thrown me a bit. I’m really not sure about how to wire these both in…
Although thinking about it turning off the wall switch in the kitchen would cut all power to the wall switch and relays upstairs in the airing cupboard.
Even if the Fibaro relay was set to On at the time, it would still cut all the power to it, by turning off the switch down stairs right?
But in normal operation for the Fibaro relay to work as the main control method for turning the immersion heater on/off then the wall switch down stairs would need to be in the On position
He’s just sent the following instructions as well!
use a junction box or heavy duty 20A connectors for the ‘lives’ as only 1 is coming out of the switch but you need to connect to 3 places.
same with neutrals as only 1 from switch but you need to connect to 3 places aswell.
Live from switch connects to:
live in fibaro
IN in fibaro
on 1 of the output terminal in the relay
Neutral from swich connects to:
neutral of fibaro
neutral of the relay (INPUT SIDE)
neutral of the immersion
OUtput 1 of the fibaro connects to the Live of the relay INPUT side
Live of immersion connects to the switched out terminal of the relay
principle
turn switch on this acts as our isolator for this whole system so dont need to turn mains off if ever need to change or alter fibaro, relay or immersion
fibaro becomes live and ready to accept z-wave commands
fibaro will then turn the relay on or off
the output contacts of the relay will close or open respectively
when relay contacts closed the immersion is on
nice and safe as we previously discussed.
Great! I redrew his diagram and added a lot more details which he’s OK’d.
Think I will have a go at doing the wiring tomorrow, I just need to buy a 20A junction box which I don’t have and I’ll have to get some type of enclosure later to house the two relays.
I don’t know whether your sparks mate warned you, but SSRs do get warm. If your immersion heater is rated at 3kW, the SSR will dissipate something like 18 Watts of heat while it is turned on. With the heatsink and with some ventilation it should not get hot enough to melt the enclosure but do bear it in mind. When turned off, the SSR will not get warm although Fibaro modules dissipate a small amount of heat all the time.
Maybe I should drill some vent holes in the sides then!
Yes I think you should have some ventilation holes. You would get better air-flow if you can put them in the top and bottom. Another approach would be to cut a hole in the lid and glue some fine mesh over it from the inside. You need to let air in and out but prevent access by small fingers.
I’ve just cut out all the access holes round the box.
I have it all wired up now and installed. However seemed to have trouble adding the fibaro relay into Vera. I put Vera in battery mode pressed the plus button and then pressed the button on the fibaro 3 times. However Vera’s lights didn’t act as usual and flash repeatedly to say it had worked. So I tried it some more times. I then tried using the minus button to exclude and then reinclude.
Looking in Vera now I have two new _applicance module devices. One works and turns the SSR / immersion on the other doesn’t seem to do anything when you press the On button for it in Vera.
As this is a 1x 3kw fibaro relay I was only expecting to see one device in Vera?
The child device is for the S2 input. It allows you to use it as an extra input which can be useful if you need some way to signal Vera with some state.
The S1 input would switch the output and thus control the SSR directly.
I still have a bit of tidying up to do around the switched fused spur, it needs a bit of filler yet in the wall and I also dropped one of the dry lining boxes clips down into the wall, so its only currently screwed in at one side. I’ll have to buy another dry lining box DOH!
I have one of those EnviR Current Cost Energy Monitors in the house and its integrated with Vera as well via the plug-in.
When I turn on the new Fibaro 3KW relay in Vera, I can see that the total Wattage usage goes up by about 3KW.
The light on the SSR relay turns on red.
However after about 6 or 7 minutes the wattage on the energy monitor drops down to around 600 watts.
If I look at the Fibaro 3KW relay in Vera its still showing as being turned on and if I go to the box upstairs the red light is still on the SSR relay.
So not sure what’s happening?
And then in the time its taken to just write the above, I then looked at Vera again and now its back up to 3441 watts.
I’d expect it to remain fairly constant, at what ever the house is currently consuming plus around 3KW for the immersion heater.
Not sure why it seems to drop down as if the immersion has gone off and then comes back again…
Its done it again its now 638 watts… and then a few minutes later its back up to 3595 watts
Maybe something to do with the thermostat on the hot water cylinder ?
Although before I did the wiring today, I never noticed the Energy monitor going up and down whilst the immersion was turned on.
Maybe something to do with the thermostat on the hot water cylinder ?
Immersion heaters usually have built-in thermostats. These turn on and off to keep the water temperature fairly constant. Because they are physically close to the heater, they can cycle quite often even though the tank temperature does not change quickly. I would expect your energy monitor to show the change in energy use as the 'stat cycles.
Can I just delete the child device from Vera? Or would it come back? Or hide it some how I dont need to see it.
If you delete this device it will re-appear after the next luup restart. You can hide it using the command:
luup.attr_set("invisible","1",123)
Replacing 123 with the device number. In UI5, this needs to be placed in Startup Lua. In UI7, it apparently sticks if run once in Test Luup code (Lua).
