Controlling my Komfovent balanced ventilation system through Home Assistant — opens up a world of possibilities.

Here are three automations I use to make the system a bit smarter 🙂

We got balanced ventilation installed last year, and have been very happy with the system 🙂 But we quickly found that we needed to expand it into two more rooms — the 1st floor bathroom, used as the laundry room, and the play room, which will be a bedroom at some point.

Time to fix that 🙂

We recently got balanced ventilation installed, and discovered that our ventilation unit has Modbus TCP/IP support. I even found a thread on the Home Assistant community talking about interfacing the C6 controller, which our unit has, into Home Assistant 😃

Here is my implementation 👇

Our house was first built as a log cabin in 1890, then extended in the 1950s, and again extended and completely renovated in 2000. It’s well insulated, and has no drafts — it seems to be relatively airtight.

Great for keeping the heat in, not so great for the air quality. Add the fact that we didn’t have a single fresh air vent, only those tiny trickle vents above the windows. What you are left with is a house with bad air quality.

So we installed a balanced ventilation system 🙂

I recently watched Jeff Gerling’s video on CO₂ levels, and how to monitor it. My home office is also in the basement, with no windows. So I paid attention to the air quality when setting up down here.

In addition to monitoring the CO₂ level, I’m also automatically ventilating the space when the air quality gets too bad.

In our new house there is an 20 m² basement, it consists of two rooms — both 10 m². I have turned the inner room into my new home office/server room, with my electronics lab and homelab.

I rebuilt the exhaust ventilation late 2017, but shortly after — I did the homelab ventilation project and had to remove parts of the exhaust system because it was in the way of the new insulated ducts. Time to rebuilt it!

The homelab is in my home office, man-cave, workshop — which is in the basement. The room is pretty well insulated, and heat generated here, mostly by the homelab, stays here. I needed a way to keep the temperature down in the hot summer months and during the cold winters. Well — this is it!

I’ve got a tiny computer lab at home; a 29U rack with servers, UPS, ATS, PDU, 10 Gbit networking, OPNsense, and all the cool stuff.

I used to smoke cigars in my home office, and the ventilation was pretty much set up for that. My duct fan was connected to an active carbon filter in the ceiling, to make sure the smoke would not be noticeable outside and leak back in when the bedroom windows were open in the summer months. That happened once, and the girlfriend did not approve.

Anyway; after I got the homelab properly set up, smoking cigars in the office just didn’t feel right… All that smoke drawn into the servers, heat-sinks, filters and so on. Never mind the lungs, think of the servers! So it was time to rebuild the exhaust ventilation system to better suit my new needs.