For scheduling I was going to try using the google calendar component orchestrated by nodered to control everything, which is something that worked really well for me with my esphome based boiler control system in my old house.
Is that likely to work here do you think?
This is exactly my train of thought as well, that plus it’s easy for the wife to use
In terms of buying this, Hive have the “Hive Active Heating without Hive Hub” available for £99 from their site but it’s not clear what version of the SLR is included…
Is it better for me to source this from ebay as others in this thread have done?
Yes I think it should, I haven’t used NR but I think it should be fine if your automations can send this mqtt payload to the receiver: {"system_mode":"heat","temperature_setpoint_hold":"1","occupied_heating_setpoint":"DESIRED_TEMPERATURE"}
I got mine separately on eBay, I think they were about 15 each plus postage, whole thing was less than £40! Just had a look and there’s a few on there now at similar prices.
Nothing much I can add as @vonagio covered it all.
I’m really happy with mine also ,it’s been working perfectly for about a month now,
I dropped really lucky on eBay as was wanting a second set besides my wired in hive to do the testing on and I found a old British Gas branded version receiver and thermostat £10.50 for both.
What model numbers are showing as the latest I can’t find them on hives website ?
Sometimes it’s only a cosmetic change or branding etc but the actual device is the same so may be able to add it as a external converter.
I’ve recently purchased a hive v3 and I think I’ve successfully integrated it with zigbee2mqtt. I’ve just added some PR’s to the herdsman and the docs. Hopefully if I’ve submitted the updates correctly it’ll be rolled out soon!
My v3 is up and running using the Z2M dev branch. I’ve adapted vonagio’s config above to work with the dual channel receiver and the heat is up and running. I’ll have a go at getting the water working tonight.
I’ve started putting my nodered flows together as well but controlling the HA entities rather than going to mqtt directly. The only problem I had was sending multiple commands at once, eg temperature and heat on commands. It works fine once I set a 5 second delay between the two commands…
One thing I’ve noticed is that the thermostat is quite glitchy and often says ‘no signal’. Has anyone else seen that? it’s possibly something to do with my setup but I don’t know what it could be, my mesh is working fine otherwise.
Last update from me, I installed this over the weekend and it’s working great so far. The ‘no signal’ problem I saw has disappeared so I put that down to the mesh settling.
Hot water is controlled with the google calendar integration and the heating is controlled with presence and a few other inputs.
This thread gave me the confidence to go ahead and set up this system for myself and Im pleased with the results so thanks for that. I have one question for someone who might have already encountered this problem im having however:
When I set the heating mode to off using the HA climate entity created by Z2M "system_mode_heat": "off" is set correctly. However if my target temp is above the local temp heating still takes place. I see that I need to set "temperature_setpoint_hold_heat": false at the same time as changing the mode in order for this to work as I intend.
Is this intended functionality, shouldn’t HA also set the second part to false and respectively back to true when you switch back to heat? Otherwise having a temperature schedule set up is somewhat harder to disable when you go away, when really pressing ‘off’ should ensure any high temp is ignored?
Is there any way to customise this default behaviour?
Trying to get this setup. I’ve followed these steps, the receiver and remote have both paired in HA and the light on the receiver turned green. However the remote continues to say searching…
I fully reset it with the instructions at the top of this thread and it all paired correctly. I’m just having issues with HA not controlling correctly but it reads temps etc.
Hey @jampez77 did you ever get any more data points for the thermostat’s entities for temp / battery (specifically battery)
I recently paired my receiver and thermostat using ZHA and, so far, it seems to be working great.
The entity with the battery is currently reporting back between 22% and 33% (bounding back and forth). An attribute under that entry shows the battery voltage at 4.8V. This 4.8V kind of makes sense as I’m using 4 rechargeable NiMH batteries that are 1.2V a piece.
4 x Alkaline (1.5V) = 6V fully charged
4 x NiMH (1.2V) = 4.8V fully charged
I created an entity from the voltage attribute so I can track but it’s sitting at 4.8V all the time, although the batteries are freshly charged so I would expect this to be the case with the NiMH batteries as the have a really flat discharge curve (until the knee at the end) compared to Alkaline batteries.
If anyone is using Alkaline batteries could you please have a look at your voltage attribute and see if it’s changing over time. I would like to take this data and make a custom cal-curve for NiMH batteries in HA so that my battery level isn’t always in the 22%-33% range.
That’s interesting. I initially paired it using ZHA and moved to zigby2mqtt because they said they had the battery part working. It wasn’t, and I didn’t like the zigby2mqtt integration because I thought it reported other parts back in a bad way.
When I moved back to ZHA it starting reporting the battery information that I presented above.
I guess I’ll keep an eye on the voltage over time and see if it ever changes.
I have successfully paired my SLR2b and SLT3B with Zigbee2MQTT.
The main problem I have is that I don’t see any of the values updated (local temp, running state, etc). Is there anything extra I should configure or should I just write an automation to poll changes, let’s say every 5 minutes?
With great thanks to this thread I’ve managed to get a hive SLR2b and SLT3b added to home assistant through zigbee2mqtt, with a functioning central heating climate entity and a boost button that I have configured to set the temperature to 32 degrees Celsius for 1 hour. I haven’t looked at hot water control just yet but that’s less urgent. I have a couple of questions I was hoping you guys and gals might be able to help with:
I have existing temperature sensors in each room, which feed into a minimum sensor, so that my climate entity is usually based on the coldest room in the house - is there a way I can do this with hive or am I tied to using the SLT3b to determine the measured temperature?
If I can’t do the above, and pick up multiple additional SLT3b units, can they be linked to the one receiver?
My longer term goal was to fit smart TRV’s in each room - has anyone successfully done this with the above setup through z2m? I’m guessing if one of the TRV’s calls for heat I could just trigger the boost at max temperature for as long as needed to reach the desired temperature? Or is there a neater way to do this?
Finally, if I do a boost on the SLT3b I can chose the desired temperature and it boosts for 1 hour, and I can do the same using the mqtt topic for the boost button on HA, but pressing the button on the receiver always sets the temperature to 22 degrees (which is probably high enough anyway) but is there a way to override this?
jchh
(my username is my initials (and my first name isn't John))
69
Yes, you can do it. You need to switch the Hive off ‘schedule’ and replace with your own HA based schedule (so you are only commanding the Hive off or on based on your HA logic/automation which can then depend on any temp sensor you like).
I haven’t yet linked my Hive to Z2M (still using the integration) but have completely replaced the Hive functionality with automations within HA and am very happy with it as you can do other things like lower the temp when away etc.
