Impressive.
It might be very interesting to chat.
I'd appreciate if you dropped me an email to dfong <a.t> lightsailenergy.com :-)
Same. What was the widget? Been thinking of hiring someone to do some board layout work to build these.
It's just an off-the-shelf Barix Barionet 50. It does the job well, and only draws a watt or two (literally).
Not terribly impressive, but $150 worth of my own work wouldn't have been able to drop the power usage to those levels.
In a single afternoon, I was able to hook some one-wire sensors into the loops, attach them to a widget that made the sensor data available via IP, write a daemon that monitors the temperature, and then automatically notifies the IP-enabled thermostat to flip over to secondary heat if the loops go below effective temperatures, and to flip back when they recover.
The next day, I made it so the loop temperatures were recorded and graphed, and that I receive an SMS alert if there's a complete HVAC failure (loops too cold + secondary heat failure).
That was some awesome tinkering.