That would be unsafe.
But connecting 230V to properly made actuator is safe.
If it wasn’t how could you use for example electric mixer safely? You can even stick it to liquid or lay it down on stainless counter top. 90% of electric equipment are not grounded because they have nothing where to ground. Plastic chassis is bad conductor.
They don’t have a motor, only a heating element.
So they heat up a wax and it pushes the piston.
Or in reverse if NC version as I have.
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And in zone valves of radiator heating systems.
The regulation will not say that kind of mechanism is not allowed.
The regulation will say the minimum safe distances, best practice when installing electric devices, etc.
This kind of thing is not safe.
A child can easlily hang on that thing.
A hairdryer is approved by many different standards, but doesn’t mean you can use it in your bathtube…
This is how an standard TRV works, without any electricity (no 230V, no 12V, no battery… Nothing).
Ok… whatever the regulation is, just post it.
I would believe they have thought of that too. Don’t you?
Having a product on the market that could be dangerous is very very expensive.
Ask Samsung how it went with their exploding batteries.
It’s a miracle that they could stay in business after such a thing.
A smal producer creating a thermal actuator will probably not survive if there is a flaw in the design, and that is probably why it uses the double isolation standard.
Yes but they can only be controlled manually.
This is controlled with a very small current (2 W @ 230v).
Electrical safety
Keep cables and leads away from water, cookers, and other sources of heat.
Check also BS 7671
Common sense is also valid: never install something operating at 230V in a location that can be easily accessed by a child, especially if the device or its cable presents a risk of being grabbed, pulled, or hung upon.
There is no water.
That section is for a sink/shower or bathtub.
Heat? Really? Come on…
Just give up.
Alright so tell me, how many cables do you have that is visible or possible to pull on.
If you say none then you are lying.
It seems the whole discussion is going in a different direction, but let me reply to the original post:
If you want to heat different rooms in your house at different moments, I think smart TRV’s are a good solution.
I have a smart thermostat that measures the temperature in the living room and tells my heat pump to deliver hot water to the central system or not. I can override that by telling it to heat anyway even if the temperature in the living room is above the setpoint. If I want to heat the bedroom but not the living room, I can close the TRV’s in the living room, open the ones in the bedroom and tell the system to supply heat.
Yes, I can do this manually too. But I prefer it automated. So e.g. my bathroom is not wasting energy all night but still warm when I get up in the morning.
Something similar could be done with actuators that do not have temperature measurement in them but are controlled by HA based on external sensors (I use external sensors anyway because the valves are close to the radiator and a bad way to measure room temperature). I like the fact you can set the temperature locally on the valve even if the whole network goes down or you don’t have your phone in your hand.
I use Popp TRV’s, which are rebranded Danfoss Ally units. They work very reliably on ZHA. I’ve had them for almost two years now, 10 pieces. Only one of them had to be restarted once because it fell off the network, for the rest no issues. Sound is very limited, a light buzzing noise but it’s short and not loud and not often.
If you always heat all the rooms in your house at the same time and don’t change setpoints based on a schedule or something like that you’re fine with manual TRV’s I guess. Smart actuators without thermostats seem a reasonable middle ground and lower tech so more reliable (as long as they have some kind of manual mode too).
The way we have “backup” is to just switch on the smart plug by pressing the button.
And if we don’t have any electricity then we unscrew the actuators which will set the radiators on max.
(And if it’s a long power out then we have the old thermostats we can put back).
This is a very important point.
And also why I felt actuators was better.
I don’t want to force my way around the built in temperature sensor or the other smart stuff of an TRV.
For me an actuator that just does what I say is preferred since I can build my own automations and “smart”.
Buying a TRV with all that smart and temperature sensor to then not use it and buy external means you double pay.
hm… what would you “force” here? As i said sonoff trv has built-in option to use external sensor. Nothing forced here. In my case sonoff is just battery-powered actuator, nothing else. That way i eliminate the need of drawing wires all across the house.
Yes Sonoff has the ability for external sensors.
But not every one.
Doesn’t it have to be a specific sensor also? Or could you have any sensor?
I control sonoff via HA, so any sensor is ok. I think that if you’d use original sonoff’s sensor then it can operate standalone, but there are numerous reports of sonoff sensor being very inaccurate…
Let’s put it together.
Wired thermal actuator is long-life and silent approach. But it’s also slow.
Battery powered motorized actuator is noisy and likely has shorter life than thermal expansion actuator.
Thermal one asks lot of power, not good approach for battery power.
RenatoY needs to deepen his knowledge about electricity.
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Popp/Danfoss has multiple ways around the temperature measurement issue. You can either give it a fixed offset or send the value of the external sensor to the TRV through an automation.
I actually do neither because I have been to lazy for that and simply send a higher setpoint 
.
If there are non smart battery powered valves with manual operation I would be fine buying those instead. The need for 240 wiring to each valve is a deal breaker for me.
I bought 4 sonoff’s for under 90€ on banggood. I doubt there is much cheaper option available…many if not most valves are higher priced.
The ones I bought was about $20 I believe.
But it was a 10 pack and I sold some of them.
I realize that could be why the didn’t perfor as good as they should.
But an actuator is about $10-15, add a smart plug and a temperature sensor and you are less than $50 per room.
Yeah, but actuator is not battery powered and, above all, it doesn’t have wireless conectivity. Actually, they don’t have anything, so you need some sort of electronics to connect them to. Sonoff’s are ready-made, plug&play devices.
My sonoff’s are actually just battery powered zigbee connected actuators.
Well you cut the quote a bit short there didn’t you? If you just read the next couple of words then there wouldn’t be any need for the rant.
And yes they are not battery powered, and that is a good thing.
I don’t have to spend another $10 a year on batteries plus $15 to get this “ready-made plug&play” to get proper reading from an external sensor.
Just doing a quick search on all the issues people have with the battery powered TRVs on this forum is mind boggling.
Some of them even self destruct with the motor winding it to pieces.
Connectivity issues since they are end devices, and issues with setting a valve position.
Or integration issues since the model they bought is not supported.
I also had a lot of those issues hence why I opted to route a 1-2 m cable to each radiator and have a Zigbee router smart plug be the on/off on the radiator.
Keep in mind I have had both options. I only support one of them.
How about you buy one actuator and give it a try?