Attacking My Landlord's Boiler

Summary

Attacking My Landlord's BoilerPosted on April 22, 2025 • 10 minute readPlease do your due diligence and check local laws before attempting anything I do in this post. Transmitting radio signals can become legally problematic very quickly, and the band I specifically transmit on here (868Mhz) is illegal in the United States without a license. I'd rather you didn't have men in suits knocking on your door on my account. You've been warned!A little while ago I moved into an apartment to live on my own for the first time. This has given me a decent amount of newfound freedom to sculpt my living environment to my liking, but not enough where I could start knocking down walls. I have a landlord (and a deposit!) to think about, after all. 🙂While it isn't near the level of knocking down walls, I was finding heating my apartment rather frustrating. The boiler's thermostat installed by my landlord is a single radio-controlled unit that uses a built-in temperature sensor to modulate the heating on and off to meet a target temperature. This presents a few first-world problems:The temperature sensor can only sample a single room in the apartment, which heats unevenly.That room is dependent on the physical proximity of the thermostat's controls, which can be annoying to use if I might be in bed and the controls are in the living room or vice versa.If I forget to turn the heating off before I leave the apartment, I'm wasting a lot of costly energy.I automate things around my apartment with Home Assistant, and I wanted to be able to do the same here. There are a lot of off-the-shelf solutions for this, obviously, but to get back to the knocking-down-walls comparison, they would require my landlord's cooperation and likely a visit from an electrician. I don't want that!Instead, here's how I figured out how to control my apartment's heating in a way that leaves no trace using the existing thermostat already fitted by my landlord, and maybe learn a bit about radios along the way.Where ...