For me, the advantages are:
- I can still use the Blynk cloud server, but I have a Raspberry Pi set-u in my own network to act as an MQTT/Node-Red server. This means that things like temperature control work autonomously should the internet go down - provided of course they my Node-Red server doesn’t go down.
- Integration with services like Amazon Alexa are simple in Node-Red
- You don’t have to use Bridge code when using multiple devices that need to talk to each other (such as temperature sensors and Bluetooth gateways)
- It makes it simper to integrate other controllers, such as Nextion touch screens for local control over temperature settings.
- If you ever decided to replace the Blynk app with something else then almost every Home Automation system uses MQTT
With your radiator vales you could use something like this as a ready-made solution if you were running MQTT:
Pete.