Solar Heating: Booster Fan Automation, Part 1

Putting together a Z-Wave controlled dual dry contact relay to help automate the solar heating system for the house.

For this application, I need dry contacts to be able to wire these relays in series with existing circuitry in the solar heating system. For the booster fan, while it does run on 120VAC, that power is in turn switched on an off by the solar heating controller. So if I were to power the Z-Wave relay off that switched power, if the solar heating system was off, no power would get to the Z-Wave relay and thus it could never get the command to turn itself on.

There are dry contact Z-Wave relays available, but those tend to be for special applications and are priced accordingly. These Vision dual relays are not dry contacts, they're internally connected to the line voltage. Thus, I use that switched AC power to turn a small USB charger on and off and then use that 5V output to turn a small relay on and off.

More to come, pairing the relay with the Z-Wave controller...

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Intro/Outro:
Louisiana Fairytale by Austin Rogers
https://web.archive.org/web/20170402222425/http://drfiddle.com/show_tune.php?id=94