5 Comments

  1. Gavin Taylor

    Really interesting to come across your hack for the boilermate 2000
    I have one of those systems and also have 5.8kw of solar which i would love to use with the electric heating element during the summer, rather than gas all the time.
    I seen that it has 2 x 4.5kw heating elements , which i could use just one or wire them in series (2.25kw) but i read in the instructions the electric element runs the hot water at a higher temperature and runs all the time. Iv designed a system to read how much solar is being produced and switch a relay on or off when gets to a certain level.
    Have you got any ideas on how the switch side of it operates ?

    • Mal Hubert

      Hey. My system has a physical switch to turn on the electric element into “Emergency HW” or “Emergency HW and Heating” mode. Covered by this:

      http://www.boilermanuals.org.uk/boilers/Gledhill/boilermate%202000.pdf Page 25

      Instead of the Glasslin “Clock” I have a Honeywell Thermostat in at the minute.

      Maybe desolder the knob and have a separate microcontroller and relays to emulate that manual switching between Normal (Gas) and Emergency HTG&HW modes when the solar is above a threshold.

      I’m not 100% sure the schematic of that XB386 PCB behind the switch, it appears to light the LEDs, and cuts off the switched live to the HTG and HW pumps depending on what mode the switch is in.

      I would be tempted to redesign that board to let it drop a PSU and ESP8266 on it.

    • Mathew howlett

      Just interested in how these clever hacks have progressed. I also have a boilermate 2000/switch electric heating element. I’m also having solar installed in the next few weeks and thought about this possibility myself.

  2. Glen

    Thanks for your write up, I found it very helpful. I have been controlling my Electromate2000 via Home Assistant / MQTT for 12 months now. I control 3 switches; [Peak/Off Peak] & [Summer/Winter] to give me 3 temperature ranges + [Enable] allows me to heat the water only when rates are low. I have a separate WIFI thermostat to control the radiator temperature. I would love to access to the actual temperature sensors data from the CPU, your analysis makes it more likely that this is possible. The GT155 board in your unit has a square LED driver IC and a debug port , I don’t suppose you have any idea what information is available via that debug connector? I was thinking of buying a spare board with that connector on the off chance that I can access the required data via this connector.

  3. Paul Stanghan

    Hi, I read your comments with interest as I have a Boilermate 2000 and have done a fair amount of reverse engineering on the system too – mainly to assist with repairing the control board where the opto-triacs used to fail at regular intervals. The temperature sensors seem to be based around the DS18B20 IC – certainly the Arduino library for that device is able to read temperature from it.
    For the domestic hot water temperature control, the motor appears to be driven by a zero voltage crossing trigger triac that is fed by a PWM signal which sends bursts of mains power to alter the average power input – hence changing the pump speed

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