Integrating a BEOK BOT-313 Thermostat (Part 1)

In a previous entry I talked about building a hardware interface to the Texecom panel with a few ideas in mind, but initially triggered by wanting to avoid heating the kitchen when the cat is out:

Less of a problem in the summer of course, but also a good time to play around with heating controls. I am still using FHEM as my central control system, basically because I have yet to find anything better. It does perhaps look a bit old fashioned now but it is very functional and still has a broad range of compatibility.

My kitchen underfloor heating is controlled by a solenoid valve, which when energised opens the flow to the heating pipes and calls for heat from the boiler. The original control was a Heatmiser Neo which is a nice system and ‘automatable’ – but only if you have the matching hub. In any case it doesn’t work with FHEM and I’m not sure how open it is.

My requirement was for a normal wall thermostat / programmer which could also be controlled remotely by FHEM and which looked the part. As it turned out, this was not easy to find or at least not without spending a lot of money. There are quite a few ‘wifi controlled’ thermostats out there which use some kind of an app, but most of them are standalone and not supported by anything much.

After a lot of digging around I came up with the BEOK BOT-313. This is a fairly typical low-cost Chinese import but someone has decoded the protocol and it is supported natively by FHEM:

Getting hold of one proved a little more complicated than I’d hoped. It turns out there are several different versions of this which are designed to work with a number of different heating types. I originally got one from Amazon but it turned out to be a version for use with an electric heater, and did not provide the simple relay that I needed. Instead it simply provided a Live and Neutral output. So whilst I could probably have hacked things together I eventually took a deep breath and ordered the correct one direct from China on Aliexpress. There are various choices but I got the 240v wired in version.

There is a lot of debate on the FHEM forums about different software versions on these devices, which are also sold under a variety of brands (Fluoreon is one but there are various others). However the safest thing seems to be to buy this particular one.

I have bought stuff from China before and so I knew what to expect but I was pleasantly surprised by the quick delivery, it did take a few weeks but that’s not bad given the circumstances. It was cheap too!

Installing it was fairly easy, it’s just a matter of connecting up the mains supply and the boiler terminals. You can use it as a standalone unit, but the value clearly lies in getting it on the network. Unfortunately this is not easy as you have to use the BOK app which is pretty ropey. The other thing is that it only works with 2.4GHz Wifi and it won’t connect if you have a 5GHz network on the same SSID, so I had to temporarily disable the 5GHz before it would pair. Once this is done you can switch the 5GHz back on again and it works fine.

So with the hardware in it’s a matter of configuring it in FHEM… so more in Part 2!